Disable WiFi and Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi

Device Tree Overlays provide a way to modify the device tree without re-compiling the complete device tree. Overlays are small pieces, or fragments of a complete device tree, and can be added or removed as needed, often enabling/disabling hardware components in the system. Using overlays we can easily disable WiFi and Bluetooth at boot time.

In Raspbian /boot/config.txt is used to configure device tree overlays. Edit the file and add the following lines to [all] section:

# ...

[all]

# Disable WiFi
dtoverlay=disable-wifi

# Disable Bluetooth
dtoverlay=disable-bt

Now save the file, reboot the Raspberry and verify that WiFi interface wlan0 is not shown when running: ip -br addr

There are a lot of other overlays that can be used to control the kernel at boot time and information about them can be found in /boot/overlays/README.