A 2.4Ghz wifi access point (the rPi Zero W doesn’t support 5Ghz which I learned the hard way 😞 ).

A micro USB cable (to plug the rPi into your computer temporarily).

An 8GB+ MicroSD card (and some way to plug it into your computer in order to flash an image to it).

I will refer to the Raspberry Pi Zero W as simply “rPi” from here on out.

If you’re reading this you’re probably here to learn how to get a Raspberry Pi Zero W running headless Raspbian and connected wirelessly to the internet all while using macOS. This setup requires no monitor, or external keyboard, not even the OTG USB cable (I it bought because I thought I needed it). That said, I highly recommend replacing some of the manual setup steps in this post by using rpi-imager instead! I might pick up another rPi Zero if they release a new version in the future, at which time I will update this post.

At the time, I setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W from scratch to confirm these exact steps still worked, however I have since passed along my rPi Zero W to someone else so I cannot support this article with newer Raspbian versions. This was last updated in 2019 after it was published and confirmed to work with up to, and including, Raspbian Buster Lite + macOS Mojave.

Pi zero w wifi setup