Terminal Command to Connect to Wi-Fi

Today’s post is going to be different from previous ones and shorter. Instead of the usual detailed exploration of a topic, I will provide a quick fix for something I experienced not long ago.

I was trying to connect to my hotspot on my computer, and it would not show up on the list of available access points. I tried looking for it inside the widget at the top, went to my Wi-Fi settings; I did everything I could, and for whatever reason, it just wouldn’t show up at all anywhere.

Using a different computer, I was able to see and connect to my mobile hotspot. Which means that the issue was with my computer and that the hotspot was actually working fine. So here is what I did to connect to my hotspot using Terminal.

First step is to get your Wi-Fi name. In this case, my hotspot name, but I didn’t need any commands to find it as I already knew this information.

Once you grab the Wi-Fi name, you will need to find out the device name for your Wi-Fi. You can use this command to find it: networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder. As you can see from the screenshot, my Wi-Fi device name is en0.

Now we need to know the password to the Wi-Fi and we have all the required information to connect to it. Type this command on your Terminal:

networksetup -setairportnetwork [WiFi DEVICE NAME] [NETWORK SSID] [NETWORK PASSWORD]

It should look like in the screenshot below.

If everything went well, you should see that your computer successfully connected to Wi-Fi. If you see an error message, double-check the spelling of your Wi-Fi network name and password, as this is a very common error that many users encounter.