Autoflash automates the process of flashing OpenWrt onto routers: given a serial port and a network interface to use, it knows how to talk to uBoot, set up a network interface, load and boot an initrd using tftp, copy a sysupgrade image over ssh, and run sysupgrade. It uses network namespaces to avoid conflicts with other network connections.
The project consists of:
- A set of python tools for talking to serial ports, configuring networks, running dnsmasq etc.
- Sets of tasks specific to each supported device, built using the generic tools.
- A command-line tool for running the tasks.
You might want to use this if:
- You're developing openwrt and want to speed up or automate your build/test cycle.
- You want to install openwrt on lots of devices.
- You find the manual install processes annoying and fiddly.
Currently, using this will almost certainly involve writing code; this is still a new project and very few devices are supported. For simple cases this will mostly be copy/paste, though. There are a few obvious deficiencies, primarily in the user interface, which are listed in the issue tracker.
Requirements:
- linux (this uses linux networking features; docker/virtualisation may be used on other platforms)
- iproute2 (the
ipcommand) - Python 3.8+
- dnsmasq (optional, needed for tftp)
To install:
python -m pip install git+https://github.com/tomjnixon/autoflash.git
Typical usage looks something like this:
# autoflash --ifname eth0 --serial-port /dev/ttyUSB0 bt_homehub-v5a boot initrd.bin miniterm
\______________________________________/ \____________/ \_____________/ \______/
| | | |
global configuration --' device name -' first task -' second task -'
Generally this will need to run as root to be able to change network configuration.
The parts are as follows:
Configuration that applies to all tasks; run autoflash --help for a list of options.
The name of the device, which affects the list available tasks; run autoflash list to show the available devices.
The tasks to execute; run autoflash bt_homehub-v5a list (with your device name) to list the available tasks.
The task name is followed by optional and required arguments; run autoflash bt_homehub-v5a boot --help (with your device and task names) show the supported arguments.
Multiple tasks may be specified, by concatenating the arguments.
For development, use poetry:
git clone https://github.com/tomjnixon/autoflash.git
cd autoflash
# pip install --user poetry
poetry install
Then, prefix commands with poetry run, like:
poetry run autoflash --help
Various tools are configured:
poetry run black autoflash # format code
poetry run mypy # type check
poetry run flake8 autoflash # style check
poetry run pytest # run tests