Setting a static IP address in Ubuntu 24.04 using netplan

While setting up PiHole on an Ubuntu 24.04 server, I realized that the usual instructions I’d been following for years on Debian systems for setting a static IP address (often involving /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/resolv.conf) weren’t going to work here. It’s worth sharing now that I’ve learned how for myself. Netplan basically acts as a translation layer, it takes configuration files, and creates the right systemd-networkd or Networkmanager configuration.

The first thing I did was to disable the cloud-init networking.

I created a file, sudo nano /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following contents:

network: {config: disabled}

Then, edited the existing netplan configuration file, for me this was sudo nano /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml, which originally looked like this:

network:
    ethernets:
        enp1s0:
            dhcp4: true
    version: 2
    wifis: {}

What it’s basically doing is setting the network interface enp1s0 to use DHCP (and is not static).

I changed it to make it look like this:

network:
    ethernets:
        enp1s0:
            dhcp4: false
            dhcp6: false
            addresses:
              - 192.168.50.111/24
            routes:
              - to: default
                via: 192.168.50.1
            nameservers:
                addresses: [1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8]
    version: 2
    wifis: {}

There are a few things happening here:

• dhcp4: false and dhcp6: false are disabling DHCP for both IPv4 and IPv6.
• addresses is setting the static IP address.
• routes is setting the default gateway and pointing at my router, 192.168.50.1
• nameservers is setting the DNS servers to use, I’ve chosen one Cloudflare and one Google DNS.

To then apply the changes,

sudo netplan apply

Then check on the status:

sudo netplan status enp1s0