How to Shut Down or Reboot Raspberry Pi

Yes, the Raspberry Pi does not come with a power button to either shut down or reboot the board. You need to use the Terminal or the Desktop GUI to apply the changes. But the best part is that you canremotely connect to Raspberry Piand SSH your way into the Terminal. From there, you can shut down or reboot the Raspberry Pi with ease. You can even choose touse your Windows laptop as a monitor for Raspberry Pito execute these operations. So to learn about the steps to shut down the Raspberry Pi in detail, let’s head over to the tutorial.

Shut Down or Reboot Raspberry Pi

Shut Down or Reboot Raspberry Pi

We have explained multiple ways to shut down or reboot a Raspberry Pi in this article. You can either use the Desktop GUI, Terminal, or even add a physical power button to the RPi board. With that said, let’s dive in and take a look at these methods:

How to Shut Down Raspberry Pi

If you are using Raspberry Pi through the Desktop GUI (sayRaspbian OS), shutting down the board is as simple as it can get.

  1. Simply click on the Raspberry menu on the top-left corner and click on “Logout“.

  2. Next, click on the “Shutdown” button in the pop-up window, and that’s pretty much it. Your Raspberry Pi will shut down immediately.

If you like to use the Terminal on the Raspberry Pi through SSH or wired connection, you have several ways to shut down the Raspberry Pi.

  1. To begin with, open the Terminal and runany one of the below commands. They will instantly shut down your RPi.

or

  1. In case you want to shut down your Raspberry Piafter a certain period of time, you can define your argument like this. Here,30means that your Raspberry Pi will shut down after 30 minutes. Moreover, you can use theshutdown -ccommand to cancel the scheduled shutdown operation.

  2. For shutting down the Raspberry Piat a particular time, say at 9:00 PM, you can define the command as under. Remember that the Terminal follows the 24-hour clock system.

If you are an advanced user, you can go ahead and add aphysical power button through the GPIO pinson the Raspberry Pi board. You also need to configure the GPIO headers through the Terminal. For a detailed tutorial, head over to thispage. Apart from that, if you want a simpler solution, buy a USB Type-C Power Switch cable from Amazon ($7.99) to turn off/ on your Raspberry Pi without any hassles.

Lastly, if you are too lazy to go through the Terminal or desktop GUI, you can simplydisconnect the power cableto shut down your Raspberry Pi. This will turn off the Raspberry Pi instantly, but we advice you to use any of the other methods described above. That said, make sure you save all your work if you prefer to pull the plug.

How to Reboot Raspberry Pi

Similar to the shutdown process, you can reboot your Raspberry Pi from the Desktop GUI environment. The steps are also the same.

  1. Open theRaspberry menufrom the top-left corner and click on “Logout“.

  2. Here, click on “Reboot” in the pop-up window, and the Raspberry Pi will restart right away.

  3. To restart Raspberry Pi instantly,fire up the Terminaland run either of the below commands. These commands work via a wired or SSH connection, so you can reboot a Raspberry Pi board remotely as well.

or

Power Off or Restart Your Raspberry Pi in a Few Easy Steps!

Power Off or Restart Your Raspberry Pi in a Few Easy Steps!

So that is how you can shut down your Raspberry Pi or restart it using the Desktop GUI or Terminal. And if you are good with hardware, adding a power switch through the GPIO header pins on the board could be a good idea. Anyway, that is all from us. To learn more about thebest Raspberry Pi commands, follow our linked article. And if you have any questions, comment down below and let us know.

Arjun Sha

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.

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