Setting a static ip in nmcli

By default nmcli (NewtworkManager cli) will try to obtain the ip with DHCP, and that’s fine, but if you want to set a static ip here’s how:

1. Check the current ip/gateway address in use

ip addr show <dev> for ip/subnet.
And ip route to know the gateway.

This is all the information that will be needed for configuring your static network connection.

2. Discover where your current conf settings are

In contrast to traditional deb-sys network configuration
(which is stored in /etc/network/interfaces),
NetworkManager connection conf can be found in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections.
There are many Gui tools that you can use to interact with configuration, but in the end it’s these file that contain the information so we’ll just edit these.

With nmcli dev you can see which device is connected, and the last column indicates the name of the file which stores the config
(relative to /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections).

3. Changing the settings

In the file you have identified in the previous step find the ipv4 section,
change method from auto to manual,
add an entry with ip, subnet, gateway (info from step 1):
address1=<ip>/<range>,<gateway>
(mine looks like this address1=192.168.42.18/24,192.168.42.1) .

And now if you restart network manager you should be connecting through your statically assigned ip.

If you compare the output of ip addr show <dev> from the one you had in step1, you should notice the absence of the flag dynamic in the ipv4 section.