Set up a Raspberry Pi for headless SSH

Firstly, we need to download the latest Raspbian (~430MB). Extract the zip file and grab the image file - it should be called something like 2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-lite.img.

Next, plug the microSD card into your computer and find out which disk number it is. For me it's usually disk2.

diskutil list

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         250.8 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +250.8 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            225.0 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 49.4 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                509.9 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      14.0 GB    disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (internal, physical):                                                  <-----
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.9 GB    disk2
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 NO NAME                 15.9 GB    disk2s1

The microSD card has come formatted and has automatically mounted, so we need to unmount it to allow overwriting it:

diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk2

We can then copy the Raspbian disk image onto the microSD card using dd. This will take a few minutes.

sudo dd bs=1m if=2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-lite.img of=/dev/rdisk2 conv=sync

Once it's written it'll again mount a volume called boot. We can enable SSH on boot by writing a file called ssh in this volume:

touch /Volumes/boot/ssh

To enable network access over the USB cable from our mac to the Pi we can enable the modules dwc2 and g_ether. (You'll need to manually edit these files - here I'm using vi)

# Add "dtoverlay=dwc2" on new line at end of file
vi /Volumes/boot/config.txt

# Add "modules-load=dwc2,g_ether" to end of line (after "rootwait")
vi /Volumes/boot/cmdline.txt

Finally, eject it and insert it into the Pi.

diskutil eject /dev/disk2
# Disk /dev/disk2 ejected

From here we can connect a USB cable to it from our mac, and SSH into it locally (using the default password raspberry):

ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
# ...
# pi@raspberrypi:~ $