Automate Router WiFi bridge setup with Raspberry Pi, NodeJS, Puppeteer and Ansible

I own an old unbranded ADSL/LTE WiFi router which does the job but has a very annoying bug: every single time there's a power outage and the router reboots, or for whatever other reason I don't know about, the Wifi bridge (i.e. connection to another source WiFi network) is broken but the router doesn't automatically reconnect to the source WiFi.

In order to fix this I have to manually log into the (crappy) router admin interface from my laptop's browser, find the right admin web page from the unintuitive navigation bar, perform a few selects and clicks, retype the source WiFi password and, finally, click to apply and persist the configuration.

You can find a more detailed description in the blog post.

Solution

These 80 lines of NodeJS automate the above process thanks to the awesome puppeteer-core library. It runs both on MacOS and Linux:

• macOS: tested on my MacBook Air running NodeJS v13.13.0 and puppeteer-core v3.0.0
• Linux: tested on my Raspberry Pi armv6l architecture, NodeJS v11.15.0 and puppeteer-core v3.0.0

Here the Ansible tasks I use to deploy the solution on my Raspberry Pi