How to SSH Into a Raspberry Pi From Your iPhone

Most Raspberry Pi projects end up running headless, tucked behind a router or under a shelf with no screen attached. That is fine right up until you need to check on it, and SSH from an iPhone covers that without digging out a laptop. The whole process, from a blank SD card to a working terminal on your phone, takes about ten minutes.

Step 1: Turn on SSH before the Pi even boots

The easiest point to enable SSH is while you are still writing the SD card. In Raspberry Pi Imager, choose your device, OS and storage as usual, then click the gear icon (or press Ctrl+Shift+X) to open the advanced options before you write. Under the Services tab, switch on Enable SSH, and pick either password authentication or, if you already have an ed25519 key pair, paste in the public key and skip passwords entirely. The General tab is where you set a hostname, username and password too, current Raspberry Pi OS images no longer ship with a default pi / raspberry login, you choose your own during imaging.

If the Pi is already running with a desktop attached, you can turn SSH on afterwards instead: open a terminal, run sudo raspi-config, and enable it under Interface Options.

Step 2: Find the Pi on your network

Power it up and give it sixty to ninety seconds to finish its first boot. The quickest way to find it is by the hostname you set, usually something like raspberrypi.local, which resolves over mDNS on most home networks without needing the IP at all. If that does not resolve, check your router's connected-devices page, or run a LAN scan from your phone, our network tool Osprey lists every device on the network with its IP in one pass, which is faster than hunting through a router's admin page.

Step 3: Connect from your iPhone

Add the Pi in your SSH app using its hostname or IP, port 22, and the username you set during imaging. If you set up a key pair instead of a password, import or generate the matching private key in the app's Keychain-backed key manager. The first connection will ask you to confirm the Pi's host key, that is expected and just means your app has not seen this particular Pi before. After that, reconnecting is a single tap.

Worth knowing before you rely on it: a Pi reached only on your home WiFi is simple and safe, but if you want to reach it away from home, forwarding port 22 straight through your router exposes it to constant scanning from the open internet. Putting it behind a VPN such as WireGuard or Tailscale, and only connecting once you are on that private network, is the safer habit, even if it adds a small extra step.

Our pick: Kestrel

We build Kestrel, an SSH and server manager for iPhone, iPad and Mac (Windows is coming soon), and Pi owners are a good chunk of who it was built for. It has a full xterm-256 terminal with mosh-style reconnection so a dropped WiFi signal does not kill your session, plus SFTP for pulling files off the Pi, a live dashboard for CPU, memory and disk, and secure Keychain-backed key storage. The free tier connects up to 3 servers with the full terminal and a basic dashboard, no account required to start; SFTP, service control and cross-device sync are Pro features.

For more on getting the most out of SSH from your phone, see our posts on SSH into a server from your iPhone, how to manage your homelab from your phone, using SFTP on iPhone, and the best SSH client for iPhone.

Frequently asked questions