HOWTO: Rolling your own custom OpenWrt image

[OpenWRT-fanboy]

Historically, compiling your own bespoke OpenWrt image was the domain of the more technically inclined. Now, with extensive updates to the cloud-based fastbuild platform leveraging GitHub Actions, GHCR and aggressive caching, it is trivially easy and blazing fast. All you need is a GitHub account. If you are reading this, you probably already have one.

1. Go to https://github.com/w1700k/fastbuild and click on Fork on the upper right. Give it whatever name you want.
2. At the top around the middle, click on Actions. There is a warning message about workflows. Click on the big green button to enable. On the left, select the fastbuild workflow, then Run workflow on the right.

You are done. Each run should take as little as 15 minutes. (EDIT: In an earlier version, the first run took much longer, and required a separate restore cache step. The cache is now completely populated and integrated into fastbuild.)

This process will initially generate the same builds (ubi2, ubi2-oc, and snapshot) as those currently available. To customize, edit the user directory in your repository and make sure the .github/workflows/fastbuild.yaml file points to it.

[OpenWRT-fanboy]

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