While the Raspberry Pi can work as a basic desktop alternative, you're probably using it for more advanced projects -- most of which don't need a display, keyboard, or mouse. Perhaps it's integrated into a mobile robot, running your autonomous plant-watering assistant in the backyard, or maybe even set up on the street capturing a time-lapse video of the neighborhood activity. In such cases, it can be a pain to take the Pi out of the system every time you need to update it or tweak the code.
Thankfully, there are ways to manage the Raspberry Pi remotely without disassembling your project. This is where SSH comes in. SSH stands for Secure Shell. Compared to VNC which essentially screen shares the Pi's desktop GUI to a different computer, SSH only provides you access to the Pi's command line. This can be handy if your Pi doesn't have a GUI to begin with or if you need to quickly troubleshoot, edit code, or control the system remotely. We'll walk you through the step-by-step process of how to SSH into your Raspberry Pi.