Raspberry Pi OS • nmcli of a bridged wifi access point?

Hi
I am trying to figure out how to configure a pi to be a wifi hotspot which doesn't itself have any IP config, DHCP server or NAT/IP masquerade.
When I look in the Documentation I find this:-
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... le-hotspot
which says:-

To create a hosted wireless network on the command line, run the following command, replacing the <example-network-name> and <example-password> placeholders with your own values:

sudo nmcli device wifi hotspot ssid <example-network-name> password <example-password>
Use another wireless client, such as a laptop or smartphone, to connect to the network. Look for a network with a SSID matching <example-network-name>. Enter your network password, and you should connect successfully to the network. If your Raspberry Pi has internet access via an Ethernet connection or a second wireless adapter, you should be able to access the internet.

This suggests that the nmcli command suggested, does the entire thing of creating the wifi hotspot, giving that interface an IP address, subnet, creating a DHCP server, and masquerading any traffic onto the pi existing routing table.

What if I don't want it to do those things?

What if I want to create a wifi interface that clients can connect to (just configure an SSID and passphrase) but their traffic is then just bridged onto another interface (such as the ethernet port, or a vxlan interface)?

Can I do that with nmcli? or can I somehow put a wifi port under network manager management (so that network manager can control the bridge) but tell network manager to not configure it in any way and use hostapd to do the SSID and passphrase bit?

thanks

Statistics: Posted by dieselnutjob — Wed Jul 02, 2025 1:55 pm

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