This guide will help you set up a Samba server on your Raspberry Pi. Once this is setup and configured you can send files to your Raspberry Pi remotly

Setting up Samba on your Pi

First make sure your pi is up to date by running these two commands

  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get upgrade

Next we install Samba

  • sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

Now we need to create a folder that we will share. This can be anywhere including on a mounted external hardrive. More info on how to mount an external harddrive can be found here

  • mkdir /home/data/share

Now we can configure samba to share this folder by modifying this file

  • sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

    and adding these lines to the bottom of the file

    [shared]
path = /home/data/share
writeable=Yes
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=no

    “[shared]” – Defines the name of the share itself. We will use this later to connect to the share

    “path” – Specifies the directory on your Pi that you want to share

    “writeable” – When set to yes allows you to write to this folder

    “create mask” and “directory mask” – this option defines the maximum permissions for the files and folders

    “public” – if this is set to no the Pi will require a user to grant access to the shared directory

Once those changes are made and saved we need to set up a user for our Samba share on the Raspberry Pi. For this example we will be creating a user pi with the password raspberry

Run this command to create a user named pi

  • sudo smbpasswd -a pi

You will be prompted to enter a password.

Finally, we need to restart Samba

  • sudo systemctl restart smbd

For the next sets you will need to know the local IP Address of your Pi. If you do not know it you can run this command.

  • hostname -I

Connecting to your samba drive from Windows

  • Start by opening up the File Explorer
  • Within the File Explorer click the Computer tab
  • Then click Map network drive
  • You will see a popup asking for a folder
    • Set the Folder text box to be \\raspberrypi\share
    • If you changed the name of your share then make sure you replace “share” with the name that you chose
    • Make sure that the “Connect using different credentials” is selected
    • If for and reason the connection fails replace “raspberrypi” with the local IP address that you got from above
  • Once you hit finish you will be asked for login details
    • Enter the username and password we created above. For this example the username is pi and the password is raspberry
    • Once done hit OK

You should now be able to see your remote drive and be able to add/remove data

Connecting to your samba drive from Mac

  • Start by opening the Finder app
  • Within Finder click the Go button in the toolbar
  • Then click the Connect to Server option
  • This will ask you for a server
    • In the address box enter smb://192.168.0.159/share
    • You will need to swap ou the IP Address “192.168.0.159” with the address that you got above
    • You will also need to swamp “share” if you renamed your share to something else
  • Click Connect
  • Before the connection is complete it will ask for a username and password
    • Enter the username and password we setup above. For this example the username is pi and the password is raspberry
    • Make sure the Registered User option is selected
  • Click Connect

You should now be able to see your remote drive and be able to add/remove data