Mesh/Firmware/Web Admin Development

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See Firmware Wants for a description of what we're hoping to be able to implement with our web admin page.

The code for the web admin is hosted here:

https://github.com/sudomesh/luci-app-peopleswifi

Luci

Luci is the web admin framework that OpenWrt ships with and seems to be a popular choice among other projects. It is written in Lua, which is a sort of procedural language that's kind of a mix between javascript and ruby (??).

All of the Luci code is contained on the router in /usr/lib/lua/luci

Documentation related to the Luci project can be found at:

Luci Documentation

Its a MVC framework, and files are separated into controller/ model/ and view/

There's a fairly similar package that we can probably take some cues from:

bmx6 Luci Package

We'll likely need every AP to serve a private WPA encrypted AP even if users have their own home router so that they can config the routers securely.

Debugging

Luci is run as a cgi script. The script is at:

 /www/cgi-bin/luci

Luci has a caching system, which should be disabled when debugging, to ensure that requests are not being answered from the cache. To disable caching, change /www/cgi-bin/luci by commenting out the following lines:

-- require "luci.cacheloader"
-- luci.dispatcher.indexcache = "/tmp/luci-indexcache"

You can run /www/cgi-bin/luci from the command line like so:

REQUEST_URI="/cgi-bin/luci HTTP/1.1" QUERY_STRING="username=root&password=<password>" /www/cgi-bin/luci

The wikipedia article for CGI has a list of other environment variables that can be set to pass data to a cgi script.