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Raspberry Pi Connect

If you’re interested in Raspberry Pi Connect, you’ll also want to read our more recent update, about remote shell access and support for older Raspberry Pi devices.

Today we’re pleased to announce the beta release of Raspberry Pi Connect: a secure and easy-to-use way to access your Raspberry Pi remotely, from anywhere on the planet, using just a web browser.

It’s often extremely useful to be able to access your Raspberry Pi’s desktop remotely. There are a number of technologies which can be used to do this, including VNC, and of course the X protocol itself. But they can be hard to configure, particularly when you are attempting to access a machine on a different local network; and of course with the transition to Wayland in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, classic X remote desktop support is no longer available.

We wanted to be able to provide you with this functionality with our usual “it just works” approach. Enter Raspberry Pi Connect.

How do I get Raspberry Pi Connect?

First of all, Raspberry Pi Connect needs your Raspberry Pi to be running a 64-bit distribution of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm that uses the Wayland window server. This in turn means that, for now, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi 4, or Raspberry Pi 400.

Assuming you’re using one of these models, make sure you have the latest Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm from Raspberry Pi Imager, open a terminal, and enter:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install rpi-connect

Now reboot your Raspberry Pi, and you’ll find a new icon in your system tray at the top right of your screen. Click this icon and choose “Sign in” to get started. Hopefully you’ll find the instructions easy enough to follow, but if you need it, there’s extra documentation that covers known limitations during the beta.

What happens under the hood?

I asked Paul Mucur, who runs web development at Raspberry Pi, to explain how the underlying technology works:

When you use Raspberry Pi Connect from a web browser to connect to your Raspberry Pi device, we establish a secure peer-to-peer connection between the two using WebRTC: the same real-time communication technology that underpins the in-browser clients for Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.

Our “rpi-connect” daemon for Raspberry Pi OS is responsible for listening out for new screen sharing sessions from the Raspberry Pi Connect website, and negotiating the best possible (i.e. lowest latency) connection between the in-browser VNC client and a VNC server running on your device. In general, once a connection is established, no traffic need pass through our servers.

If for any reason it is not possible to establish a direct connection between your browser and Raspberry Pi device, rpi-connect and your browser may instead opt to securely relay traffic through our servers, encrypting it with DTLS.

Peer-to-peer and relayed connections

At the moment, the Raspberry Pi Connect service has just a single relay (TURN) server, located in the UK. This means that if rpi-connect chooses to relay traffic, the latency can be quite high. Hovering over the padlock icon in your browser while connected will reveal whether your connection is being relayed or not, so you can tell whether changes to your networking setup might improve connectivity.

Our intention is that Raspberry Pi Connect will remain free (as in beer) for individual users with non-relayed connections, with no limit on the number of devices. We don’t yet know how many people will need to relay their traffic through our TURN servers; we’ll keep an eye on the use of bandwidth and decide how to treat these connections in future.

As I said at the beginning, Raspberry Pi Connect is in beta at the moment, so please bear in mind that you might come across the occasional limitation or imperfection. We think lots of people will find it useful, and we hope you like the sound of it enough to follow the instructions above or in the Connect documentation to install it and try it out. You can let us know what you think in the Raspberry Pi Connect section of our forums.

103 comments

This is great work guys keep it up.

Twelve years and counting…

12 years full of amazing things! :)

Installed, but when accessing the rpi5 with Microsoft remote desktop no connect icon is shown. Connected to rpi5 via Tiger VNC the icon is shown, but on clicking the sign on nothing happens. No monitor to hand to see if it works when a monitor is directly connected. :-(

If you have SSH access to your Raspberry Pi device, you could try signing in via the rpi-connect CLI.

We also pushed a 1.0.1 version earlier to workaround an issue where your browser might not have automatically opened when you clicked “Sign in” from the system tray icon if the Wayland display wasn’t available when the rpi-connect service started.

Please try upgrading with the following:

sudo apt update sudo apt install --only-upgrade rpi-connect sudo reboot

Thanks a lot, Paul, for the great tool and service. I have tried it locally on my network on Mac and iPad and remotely from my mum´s house, and it is working perfectly. One wish from me: Please add a news section in the forum where changes are described on new versions, i.e. now 1.0.2.

Paulo vc pode me ajudar ; aparece para min :>>>>>>
>>>>>E: Unable to locate package rpi-connect.
e nao consigo

I have the same problem ( Unable to locate package rpi-connect.)
If you find out what the problem is let me know and if I find out I will let you know. okay.

Hi Beetle,
had the same issue with TigerVNC. Looking at my Raspi Configuration i found VNC being switched off after the installation of Raspberry Connect. Turning it on and TigerVNC works again. It seems to me that RC requires its own VNC service and disables the original VNC.

This is great but I usually use SSH. I assume that accessing the Pi via SSH outside of the local network isn’t supported yet by Pi Connect? SSH is the way I control my Pi the most! It would be ideal if Pi Connect could provide an external SSH relay subdomain, perhaps also configured from Pi Imager, to allow secure remote SSH access. Could this be on the cards? This would be amazing.

Setting up Pi Connect requires manual login on the device, right? Instead, it would also be great if Pi Imager offered an option to preconfigure Pi Connect, such as credentials for it, like with WiFi and SSH options. Making remote desktop access work right away from the first boot would be amazing too. I often have a headless setup with VNC, so right now I would have to use SSH and VNC over LAN for the initial configuration. I think an pre-configurable (but random – or maybe paid) SSH subdomain from Pi Imager would be most impacting. It could be dressed up as an identifier for Pi Connect too, so visual or text interfaces could be used easily in an easy to learn and communicate way also. Anyhow, great to see this new feature!

SSH is next…

Awesome! Looking forward to SSH support!

Looking forward to ssh support : )

Please make SSH happen. You guys rock!

Yay! Any ETA for the remote SSH?

You should look at tailscale man, it’s freaking amazing. If you’re old school and remember Hamachi – think of that but way better.

Thanks, I do know about Tailscale. They sign me out a lot, which disconnected my Pi from my reach, this is not helpful when I’m away and couldn’t access my Pi any other way. More reliable choices, especially from Raspberry Pi are very welcome!

We provide free web terminal access to Raspberry Pis on PiCockpit – only the browser is needed (and Picockpit client on the Pi). It’s free for up to 5 Pis.

Definitely take a look at tailscale man.

Hi, ¿this service is equivalent to teamviewer, in the sense that can go throug NAT with zero config?, or ¿does I need to open ports in my router to work correctly?

You don’t need to do anything special… Best way to think of it is you’re having a Hangout with your computer… It’s basically the same technology!

Hey there,
I have a raspberry pi 5, running ubuntu desktop, do you think this could work on there as it is another Linux distro?

It should be possible to install the deb file onto Ubuntu…

Where can we get the .deb file? I want to try it on ubuntu.
Looks like a very nice tool!

Really Awesome Job!!!! Thank you so much!!!!

Managed to get it working via command line. Looks good, but… It seems each time the rpi is rebooted a new token is required which is given by the rpi box itself. If one is remote and the pi reboots perhaps due to a power cut then how to re-connect for a remote place without access to the pi to set a ‘new’ device via connect.raspberrypi.com ??

That doesn’t sound right, it should just log in everytime (as long as the user is auto logged in…)
Best go ask in the Raspberry Pi Connect forum…

Hey, that sounds great!

Can I host my own relay server or is it planned for the future? My use case: a bunch of PIs in a private network without direct internet access. Would be great if I could host my own relay server in that Network (wich has inet access) for remote maintenance.

Keep it up!

If you’ve got a private network then you should just be able to use WayVNC directly without having to go through the internet.

When I try to install the package it errors out that the package can’t be found. Any ideas?

Add a post in the forums

Great, I will install and test it now :D

$ sudo apt install rpi-connect
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
wayvnc:arm64 : Depends: libaml0:arm64 (>= 0.3.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libc6:arm64 (>= 2.34) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libdrm2:arm64 (>= 2.4.75) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libgbm1:arm64 (>= 17.1.0~rc2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libjansson4:arm64 (>= 2.14) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libneatvnc0:arm64 (>= 0.9.0+dfsg) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libpam0g:arm64 (>= 0.99.7.1) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libpixman-1-0:arm64 (>= 0.25.2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libwayland-client0:arm64 (>= 1.20.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libxkbcommon0:arm64 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: python3:arm64 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: raspi-config:arm64 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I think you’re trying to install it in the 32-bit release of Raspberry Pi OS rather than the 64-bit one.

if i want to connect from internet/external network to my Raspberry Pi at home, what ports do i have to open and forward in the firewall/router?

None – that is the beauty of it.

Love this!
Gordon – how do I get to be on the alpha or pre-release list for such things, I would loved to have been included in the launch of this along with Jeff!

If you fill in the form in the beta forum you can get access to software products early

These applications modules like the ‘Hotspot’ and now ‘Connect’ are such good enhancements to the platform and make life so easy. Thank you and keep it up!
I hope some day I will get an application module that will help in setting up a RPi for Multi-room audio streaming.

I’ve been using minidlna on an RP5 for multi room streaming of both audio and video. Works great with minimal overhead. Combining this with NAS functionality works great.

Have a look at Lyrion Music Server. You can run this on any combination of Windows, macOS, Android and rpi, both for server and clients

what email address do we use when creating a raspberry pi id? do we use @rasberrypi.com when creating the raspberry pi id or can we use other email like @gmail .com and @outlook.com.

You use *your* email address, any that you can receive emails from.

instead of the server on London, can i run my own server for my rpi-connect’ions? i have already an https server running on my RPi, that i can access from the internet. so it would be nice if i could be independend from the server in London to get rpi-connections running from the internet.

Are you planning to open-source this software in the future?

I think the only concern is how can we know that at a later point it won’t be switched to a paid service? Otherwise how can you offer it for free? Love everything you guys do!

You cannot, as with everything you have to take them on their word and current plan.
They already mention that if it is not a p2p connection and goes via them, they may look at charging. I guess costs to keep it going and the servers running.

But this is beta testing at the moment, finding bugs, seeing how it scales. Report back any problems.
Or how excellent you find it.
Join on and find out.

Absolutely brilliant! I have 12 rpis running long term tests for my client products. Now I can easily monitor from anywhere in the world.

Hi Chris,
How can you manage more than 1 rpi in an account?
I can’t add other one to my “master” accout. Our rpi’s are out by friends and I would like to monitor them from my main account. Can I? How? I didn’t find any document of this.

Thank you!
Attila

When I click to “sign in” I get a quick flash screen I can see and nothing. RPI5

Use the link in the blog to get to the forum and report back your problems and what you find.
There was a newer version that had a fix for something like that, but with the date you should already be on that.

You will probably need to run the logging command. Don’t try the command line setup just yet as it does fix the bug.

It is ‘beta’ and work in progress.

Personally I use app.remote.it to access my remote machines using ssh, vnc, Etc. (works on older RPI’s 32 or 64 bit. plus windows and other unix distros). Personal use is free per fair use policy. Been using this for several years without charge (less than 5 devices on occassional basis. I can access my devices using web browser or client interface.
Never had a problem accessing my remote devices across multiple NAT networks. Install is via a curl script and must be done locally for initial setup.
Regards.

Great job! Buying RPi5 was a good decision. More software and more updates, please!

Can’t get it to work. From the webpage it says last seen less than a minute ago. I click connect, and “Checking Network Conditions.” then “Waiting for response from …” and finally “Timed out connecting to …”

Please post in the forums sharing any relevant output from the logs where we can help further.

You might be able to run rpi-connect but the dedicated WayVNC server will only work if you’re using a supported Wayland compositor (commonly Wayfire or labwc) and desktop (e.g. Raspberry Pi Desktop).

Raspberry 3b ?
Hi , I’m using a raspi 3b with new installation of raspbian 6.6.28
When will pi-connect be available for this older pi?
Regards

There was a brief test for older Pre Pi4 series and 32 bit setups.
But it is harder and not as good in use I guess (at the moment).
It needs Bookworm and Wayland (or some version based on Wayland, there is a new one in testing).
The 1GB or less Pi’s struggle when Wayland is used for the desktop.

You may be able to try it for yourself, get 64bit Bookworm, it’ll be in the other RPi OSs in Pi Imager, turn Wayland desktop on and install connect, see how it works for you.

Hi Gordon, I wanted to thank you for the service you are giving us and at the same time suggest improvements. Today we have screens with a 16:9 aspect ratio and almost exclusively portable, i.e. small screens, are sold.

Having two horizontal bars reduces the useful surface area on the screen, you could opt for a vertical and a horizontal bar, or better yet, move the 5 buttons on the main bar. If you could then switch the browser to full-screen it would be great, but for that you just need to press a button.

How do you configure this headless?

This is awesome! Thanks for creating Raspberry Pi Connect.

I’m trying to see a Pi Camera remotely and I find a lot of lag (I guess low FPS). Do you know what might be happening? I’d like to troubleshoot the issue and fix it.

Worked first time although it seems each time the rpi is rebooted a new token is required.
Unable to sign in from the drop down menu now.
rpi-connect signin returns an error “The Connect API returned an error”. Any possible fix for this?

Unable to sign in from the drop down after installation. The command “rpi-connect sigin” gives out the error message “The Connect API returned an error”. This happened after rebooting after initially installing rpi connect yesterday, worked well that time.

Tried to install it on my RPI5, but get this messages and can’t get it installed :s

sudo apt install rpi-connect
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
wayvnc : Conflicts: wayvnc:arm64 but 0.9.0~dev-1 is to be installed
wayvnc:arm64 : Depends: libaml0:arm64 (>= 0.3.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libc6:arm64 (>= 2.34) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libdrm2:arm64 (>= 2.4.75) but it is not installable
Depends: libgbm1:arm64 (>= 17.1.0~rc2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libjansson4:arm64 (>= 2.14) but it is not installable
Depends: libneatvnc0:arm64 (>= 0.9.0+dfsg) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libpam0g:arm64 (>= 0.99.7.1) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libpixman-1-0:arm64 (>= 0.25.2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libwayland-client0:arm64 (>= 1.20.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libxkbcommon0:arm64 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not installable
Depends: python3:arm64 but it is not installable
Depends: raspi-config:arm64 but it is not installable
Conflicts: wayvnc but 0.9.0~dev-1 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

See https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=370630

that was the problem.
Thank you very much

I’m unable to install this on my Raspberry Pi 4, when I run the install command I get the error Unable to locate package rpi-connect

Im using pi4 and getting same error..

I have samme issue…
Any got fix?

Fantastic – now just get it to transport audio too and I can remote to my Pi from work PC over lunch to watch youtube.

Tried this the other day on a 2GB Pi4 – works really well. Well done!
Do you have plans to expand upon this service – to provide SSH tunnels , VPN access etc?

no keyboard pops up when I open it on phone, I literally cant type anything….
also it signs out after reboot…

Yes, that feature would be useful

Do it support IPv6? IPv6 will solve many issues with NAT and stuff like that.
Yours.

First of all. Thank you for your effort, time and hard work to find a good solution for the community. I have tried it.
On phone: there is very hard to use – because the lack of keyboard. And hard to find how to use or simulate the right and left mouse clicks.
On the laptop: Inside my network connected very nice – it was slow, but works fine. Outside of the network about 100 times I tried only one!!! was successful connection.
Thank you,
Best regards
j

Wonderful piece of software. With the recent controversy surrounding RealVNC’s decision to end their free plan and the introduction of rpi-connect, my decision to invest in an Rpi5 has only strengthened. Looking forward to seeing compatibility with a wider range of devices in the near future!

Any easy to follow instructions on using the “copy to/ Paste from” buttons?

They do exactly what they say: click on one to copy from your remote desktop to the one you’re sitting in front of, or on the other button to paste from the remote desktop.

Yes, just what I thought, but nothing happens. Nothing comes or goes. I’ve hightlighted text and files on my laptop and go to the RPi and click on the “copy from remote” and nothing happens. Same copying back to the laptop. I must be missing something.

How about file transfer?

is this work only in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm ?

This is amazing man!, I was just struggling with setting up cloudflare tunnels to ssh to my pi and stumbled upon this in raspi-config!!

Is there source code for this?

Great tool for rpi community.
will this be available to older version of rpi OS (like bookworm 12) .

I think I have messed up, how can I reinstall RPI-connect as it seems I have lost access to Full Screen, now it takes me to the remote shell version. Please helppppp!

Please try installing the newly released rpi-connect 1.3.0 with sudo apt update && sudo apt install rpi-connect which should improve screen sharing support on devices where the desktop might not come up fast enough on boot for the previous release to detect.

Is it possible to use FileZilla with rpi-connect?

Is there a way to get the screen bigger when we are sharing it with others but we don’t want it to be small. if we do not want it to be big screen we can press the “esc” button to go back to normal size as what we see now in a small screen

Will it run on RPi 3B?

I have a principal account and I want to connect other accounts to the same Raspberry Pi via Remoto that they can access it without my account
I want to know if I can connect more than one people to the same Raspberry Pi and how can I do it?

This service is amazing!
Is there a place to report bugs?
I discovered that if you rotate the screen on the raspberry pi and connect to it via remote desktop mouse coordinates are inverted… so you would move to the right and cursor would go up…

Great to hear that you like it! The best place to report bugs is in the Raspberry Pi Connect forum https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewforum.php?f=167

Sorry for previous typos, forgot to say os version is buster

Can i get help with installing Connect Lite, i tried the following.
Pi ZERO INSTALL COMMAND and Response
sudo apt install rpi-connect-lite
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package rpi-connect-lite
OS VERSION
cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME=”Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)”

Hi there, the best place to ask for help is in the Raspberry Pi Connect forum https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewforum.php?f=167

1.Please add ability to L-Click R-Click in bottom menu for viewing the desktop site on mobile device

2.Also on pc add ability to change the color of the local mouse cursor PLEASE i cant see it overtop of images

Just found out the project and it is amazing, great work guys!

Does anyone know if there is planned support for remote USB connections?
More precisely in my case connect a yubikey for gpg, vpn auth, ssh, etc.

I know it is possible to enable the remote shell service at all times (so it can be used without pi being logged in, e.g. if rebooted remotely etc.), but is it possible to enable this for screen sharing too?

As I would like to be able to access the Raspberry Pi’s GUI interface without having to log in to the Pi locally first.

If not possible yet, development of this feature would be much appreciated. Thanks, Henry.

This is cool, big step forward, great if you got nothing else and you need to remote into a PI. Reminds me of the old GoTo My PC.
Some things I would like to see:
Was not able to cut and paste text from a webpage (chat gpt) over to the raspberry pi with the typical cut and paste shortcuts from Windows 11 to Raspberry PI. This was a deal breaker. RealVNC works — kinda, as long as you don’t try and copy more than 1 page of text, it will work with the CTRL-C / CTRL-V cut and paste.

Neither of these apps will allow you to drag and drop a folder of files to be copied from your source system to the remote system. You got to be kidding me!

Now, If you really really want to impress me, make a shared folder where you can use your power house computer with PyCharm / VSCode with Copilot and to edit the files so that you don’t Bog Down your PI Device CPU just trying to carry the IDE, and then save it over there on to the remote PI device and run the script from the shell. If you are doing PI cam motion detection and transcoding, you will understand the need for speed.

I’d really like this to have two modalities. One that does not require a registration of the device to some cloud service, a direct browser connect to the device via plugin or something. This does create a security hole, I don’t like the idea of others being able to access my computers / network remotely.

Once you get these things fixed, then you will really have something great IMHO. Going back to RealVNC. This was interesting, but not ready for prime time.

Does “Raspberry Pi Connect(Lite)” support “Raspberry Pi OS Lite”?

This is great if you are behind a double nat as I am, I would like cut and paste eventually.

Does anyone know of an iOS keyboard that has the CTRL button?

This popped up on my Pi2b unsolicited. Little surprised. I guess I’ll have to try it out. I noticed it on my 4 but since it’s on both now, hummmm.

This is truly quite amazing! At first I didn’t see any point in using this, but now I can literally use my CLI from anywhere and do whatever I want and that is really cool! I am excited to see how much better this gets!

4 Nov 2024 today I found the regular update on rpi-connect has an error so I remove it and install again but got the same error as below “Preparing to unpack …/rpi-connect_2.0.0_arm64.deb …
Unpacking rpi-connect (2.0.0) …
Setting up rpi-connect (2.0.0) …
Replacing globally-enabled rpi-connect services with user-enabled ones…
Enabled rpi-connect for root
Enabled rpi-connect for pi4
ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘/home/anod/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/rpi-connect.service’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package rpi-connect (–configure):
installed rpi-connect package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for man-db (2.11.2-2) …
Errors were encountered while processing:
rpi-connect
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)”
any issue on this ? thank you.

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