Raspberry Pi from scratch

What you need

Any Raspberry Pi with Wi-Fi or Ethernet — a Pi Zero 2 W, a Pi 4, a Pi 5, or anything in between. A microSD card of 8 GB or more, a power supply, and a computer to flash the card from. And a RelaySSH account, which is free during the beta.

Flash Raspberry Pi OS

Install Raspberry Pi Imager and run it. Choose your Pi model, pick Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) — there is no desktop to see — and select your microSD card.

Before writing, open the settings screen. This is the step that saves you a monitor, so fill it in completely:

• Hostname — the name you will SSH to, for example pi-desk.
• Username and password — the account you will log in as.
• Wi-Fi SSID, password, and country — the Pi joins your network on first boot.
• Enable SSH — use password authentication, or paste a public key if you have one.

Write the card, then eject it.

First boot and a local SSH session

Put the card in the Pi and power it on. First boot takes a minute or two while it resizes the filesystem and joins Wi-Fi. Then, from a computer on the same network:

ssh pi-desk@pi-desk.local

Substitute your username and the hostname you set. Accept the host key fingerprint when asked, and enter your password. You now have a shell on the Pi.

Install RelaySSH

Still in that SSH session, copy your install command from the dashboard (Add device) and run it on the Pi. It installs the agent, registers the Pi to your account, and starts the connection.

curl -fsSL https://relayssh.com/install/YOUR-INSTALL-KEY/ | sudo sh

The Pi appears in your dashboard within a few seconds. On its detail page, add a tunnel to port 22. The relay assigns that tunnel its own public port. Getting started covers what the agent is doing in more detail.

Connect from anywhere

Leave your home network — a phone hotspot is enough to prove it — and SSH to the port the dashboard assigned:

ssh -p 20001 pi-desk@relayssh.com

Same shell, from any network, with no public IP and no port forwarding. Authentication still happens on the Pi against the account you created in Imager; the relay only moves bytes.