Creating OpenWRT images with Vagrant

Use this repository to create your own OpenWRT image by running Debian in a virtual machine (VM).

The VM is configured automatically with Vagrant (https://vagrantup.com).

Getting Started

Download and install Vagrant for your operating system.

Download and install VirtualBox for your operating system.

Open the Vagrantfile in a text editor. Update the following VM parameters to match the number of CPU cores and RAM you have. Do not assign all RAM to the VM, your computer may become unresponsive otherwise.

• vb.memory = "10240" (10 GB)
• vb.cpus = 6

Open a terminal and go to the directory containing the Vagrantfile, then type:

vagrant up

This downloads a Debian VM and the OpenWRT git repository. When finished, the next steps are shown:

    default: openwrt setup complete. now type:
    default:     vagrant ssh
    default:     cd openwrt.git
    default:     make menuconfig
    default:     make -j6 V=99

Building an Existing Configuration (autobuild)

The above commands instruct you to configure OpenWRT from scratch using menuconfig. If you have a previous OpenWRT config file, use the following method to build it directly.

• Change the name of the config file to openwrt.config.autobuild
• Place it next to the Vagrantfile and
• Run vagrant up

In the logs, look for using configuration file openwrt.config.autobuild to be sure the config file is used.

Install Option 1: Copying to an SD card

Some platforms, like Raspberry Pi, require to copy the OpenWRT image to an SD card.

On OS X, this can be done with the following commands:

• Show available hard disks before adding the SD card: diskutil list
• Attach empty micro SD card to OSX (4 GB or bigger)
• Show available hard disks after adding the SD card: diskutil list
• In this example, the SD card showed up as /dev/disk4. Change disk number in the following commands to match your setup. IMPORTANT: don't mix up disk numbers, you could delete all your data!
• Unmount the SD card: diskutil unmount /dev/disk4s1
• Copy the openwrt image to the SD card: sudo dd if=openwrt-*.img of=/dev/disk4 bs=1m
• Press ctrl-t to get the status. If it says 156+0 records out this means that 156 MB have been copied as the block size bs is one megabyte 1m.
• Unmount the sd card: diskutil unmount /dev/disk4s1

Install Option 2: TFTP

Some platforms require to flash the OpenWRT image to the router using TFTP.

On OS X, this can be done like this:

• Install tftp using homebrew or macports

• Disconnect from all WiFi and Ethernet networks

• Set a static IP to your Ethernet device in systems settings. Look up the exact IP depending on your router model in the OpenWRT wiki. This example will use 192.168.3.2 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0

• Change to the directory containing your OpenWRT image

• Start tftp with the IP of the router, in this example 192.168.3.1:

  tftp 192.168.3.1
  > binary
  > trace
  > put openwrt-*.trx
  

Updating OpenWRT

You only have to do this if you intend to change the OpenWRT version.

Look up latest OpenWRT version on github.com/openwrt/openwrt/tags or git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git

Current (as of 2019) is v18.06.4

In the Vagrantfile of this repository, update the variable called GIT_TAG:

export GIT_TAG=v18.06.4

The Vagrantfile uses a Debian VM from the bento project as the disc size of the the default Debian and Ubuntu images, provided by Vagrant, is too small.

Latest version of the Debian image can be found at app.vagrantup.com/bento.

Current (as of 2019) is bento/debian-10

License

openwrt-vagrant
Copyright (C) 2019 Jahn Bertsch

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.