How to Connect the Raspberry Pi’s Ethernet Port (2 Ways)

I usually rely on Wi-Fi for everything, so I didn’t think much about Ethernet at first. But I’ve hit plenty of cases where Wi-Fi just wasn’t reliable, or not even available. That’s when Ethernet made things much smoother. I’ll show you 2 ways to set it up and avoid those annoying dropouts.

An Ethernet cable can be plugged into the Raspberry Pi’s Ethernet port and connected to a network router, laptop, or PC. The connected device usually assigns an IP address automatically to the Raspberry Pi. Afterwards, the Raspberry Pi can access the network.

Depending on which device you want to connect your Raspberry Pi’s Ethernet port to, you can follow the process below that applies best to your situation.

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Connecting a Raspberry Pi to Your Network Router

If you are using an Ethernet cable, the most common way to connect Raspberry Pi is directly to a network router or switch. Here are the steps to do this easily.

Prerequisites

This is a fairly straightforward solution, with very few prerequisites, but here’s what you need:

• Ethernet cable: This cable is used to connect the Raspberry Pi to your network router. Pick the right length for your setup, but the model doesn’t matter much (so I linked to the cheapest option).
• Network router: Most internet service providers include a network router for you to connect your devices to the internet. You can also have a switch plugged into the Raspberry Pi and the ISP router, or even a different router if you plan to create a new subnetwork.
• Any Raspberry Pi model: You can use any mainline Raspberry Pi model (but not the Pi Zero models, as they don’t have an onboard Ethernet port).

Steps to Connect the Pi to a Router

In most cases, connecting a Raspberry Pi to a router is straightforward:

1. Go to your network router and look for a vacant Ethernet port.
   The ports are usually at the back of the router.
   
2. Connect one end of the Ethernet cable to the router’s port and the other end to your Raspberry Pi’s Ethernet port.
3. Turn your Raspberry Pi ON.
4. Once booted up, your Raspberry Pi should automatically be connected to the network router and will be assigned an IP Address.

You can test this by opening a browser on your Raspberry Pi and visiting your favorite website to see if it loads. If it does, congratulations, you have successfully connected your Raspberry Pi to your network router.

If the page doesn’t load, it’s probably because your router doesn’t have DHCP enabled, or has some kind of MAC address filtering in place. You may need to configure the router for the Raspberry Pi, or even set a static IP address on the Raspberry Pi.

Connecting a Raspberry Pi to PC Directly

When you don’t have a switch or router at hand, you can also connect the Raspberry Pi directly to another computer (a laptop or PC, for instance).

The steps to connect a Raspberry Pi to a laptop are very similar to connecting to a network router, except that you replace the network router with your laptop and probably do a bit more network configuration.

Prerequisites

Here are the requirements for this setup:

• Ethernet cable: This cable is used to connect the Raspberry Pi to your network router.
• Laptop with Ethernet port: To use your laptop for this, it should have an Ethernet port. If your laptop does not have an Ethernet port, you can purchase this USB to Ethernet adapter to connect the Ethernet cable.
• Any Raspberry Pi model: You can use any Raspberry Pi model aside from the Raspberry Pi Zero models, as they don’t have an onboard Ethernet port.

Steps to Connect a Pi to PC

Note: You may have heard of a feature called “link-local fallback” in the most recent release of Raspberry Pi OS (trixie). It’s meant to be an easy solution to this problem, but in my tests, this method isn’t 100% consistent yet.

So at the moment, the most reliable way is to set static IPs, which we’ll cover below.

Here are the big picture steps to connect your Raspberry Pi to another computer:

1. Configure the laptop IP address.
2. Set the Raspberry Pi IP address on the same network.
3. Connect the Ethernet cable between the Raspberry Pi and the laptop.
4. Test the connection.

I’ll now explain each one in detail.

Configure the Laptop Connection

On a traditional network, a service (DHCP server) assigns IP addresses automatically to all devices. When you use a direct connection between a laptop and the Raspberry Pi, however, it’s unlikely that your laptop will do this for you.

An easy workaround is to manually set a static IP address on both devices.
Here are the steps to set up the laptop IP address on Windows:

• Open the Control Panel (Start > type “Control Panel”).
  
• Go to Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center.
• Click Change Adapter Settings.
  This can be slightly different based on your Windows version, but you should find something that looks like the next screenshot.
  
• Double-click on the Ethernet adapter to open its Status window and click Properties.
• Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and open its Properties.
• Tick “Use the following IP Address” option and enter the following information:
  • IP Address: 192.168.137.1
  • Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
  • Default Gateway: (leave it blank)
    
• Click OK to save and Close the status window.
• It usually takes a minute or two before the settings are applied.

Note: If you sometimes use your laptop’s Ethernet connection to access the Internet, you’ll need to remove this configuration and revert to the default options when you aren’t plugging in the Raspberry Pi.

Setting Up the Raspberry Pi IP Address

The next step is basically to do something similar on the Raspberry Pi:

• Set up a static IP address on the same subnetwork (for example: 192.168.137.10).
• Set the default gateway as the laptop’s IP address (so all traffic goes through the laptop).

There are a few ways to do this on the Raspberry Pi, depending on your system version.
You can check this tutorial where I explain the different methods in detail.

In the end, if you have a GUI installed, you should have something like this:

Connecting and Testing

Now that the Raspberry Pi and laptop are configured to use addresses on the same network, we can simply connect them directly with the Ethernet cable and see how it goes.

• Plug the Ethernet cable on both ends (the Raspberry Pi Ethernet port and the laptop port or adapter).
• You can use the ping command from one side or the other to check if it’s working.
  For example, from the Raspberry Pi terminal:
  ping 192.168.137.1

If you get an answer when the cable is connected, it means your setup is complete. Congratulations, you have now successfully connected your Raspberry Pi to your laptop using the Ethernet cable.

From there, you can use VNC or SSH to control the Raspberry Pi from your laptop. Or share resources from the local network with the Raspberry Pi.

Tip: Command lines can be a pain to memorize. I put the essential Linux commands on a printable cheat sheet so you don't have to keep googling them. You can grab the PDF here if you want to save some time.

Share Internet Access from Your Laptop

You can even go a bit further and share the Internet access from the laptop to the Raspberry Pi.

By default, your laptop will not share internet access to connected devices through the Ethernet port. We can enable this as long as your laptop has a second network adapter, either:

• A separate Ethernet port on your laptop connected with internet access.
• A Wi-Fi connection that has internet access.

Here are the additional steps to do this:

• Get back to the Control Panel where you can change the adapter settings.
• Double-click on the network adapter that has internet access (probably the Wi-Fi adapter).
• Click Properties, and switch to the Sharing tab.
• Tick Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.
  
• Under Home networking connection, select your Ethernet adapter from the dropdown.

That’s it! You should have internet access already for your Raspberry Pi that is connected to your Ethernet port.

Going Further

That’s it, now that you can connect your Raspberry Pi’s Ethernet port to either a network router or a laptop, you should be able to connect to your Raspberry Pi without the need for Wi-Fi.

Connecting directly to your Raspberry Pi using a wired connection creates a more stable connection between you and your Raspberry Pi, you can take a look at some of my articles that can greatly benefit from this:

• What Cables Do You Really Need for Raspberry Pi? (Full Guide)
• Installing an FTP Server on Raspberry Pi
• Assigning a static IP address to your Raspberry Pi
• 15 Raspberry Pi Network Projects for Home and Office Use
• 11 Essential Linux Commands to Troubleshoot Network Issues

Not getting the same result?

Even when you follow every step, small differences in OS version, hardware or config can change the outcome. Instead of wasting time guessing, get help from people who have already fixed the same kind of issue.

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