A Few Things About OpenWRT Compilation

Let me answer a few questions first

• Why compile it myself? I’m a mature computer science student (lol).
• Why use Github Actions? Because Github is really convenient I originally wanted to use my dedicated AMD 9950X as the build machine, but it failed after 15 minutes and I was too lazy to troubleshoot
• Why can’t I understand this? If you don’t understand, don’t read it. Just download pre-compiled packages from others.

The following is based on the latest OpenWRT (23.05) + Github Actions online compilation

1. Preparation#

Clone the repository locally#

First, you need to Fork the LEDE source code. LEDE repository [Github][1]

Clone the repository you just forked to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/your-username/lede

Don’t download ZIP! The ZIP file is not a Git repository and doesn’t contain the .git folder, so you can’t use git commands on it.

Update Feeds#

cd lede
./scripts/feeds update -a
./scripts/feeds install -a

If you don’t update the feeds, you won’t see Luci apps later! This step is mandatory!

Enter the configuration menu#

Use the following command to enter the configuration menu:

make menuconfig

Configuration menu explanation#

Generally, you only need to modify these:

• Target System: Processor architecture
• Subtarget: Select processor
• Target Profile: Preconfigured profile
• LuCI: LuCI plugins
  • Applications: Applications
  • Themes: Themes

For example, I selected:

• Target System: Mediatek-ARM
• Subtarget: Filogic
• Target Profile: ASR3000
• LuCI: LuCI plugins
  • Applications: Many fun plugins for you to explore!
  • Themes: luci-theme-material

After making changes, select Save to save as a .config file.

For Luci plugins, please refer to [this article on the Enshan forum][2]

Commit to your forked repository#

1. Delete the /.config line in the .gitignore file to stop ignoring the config file. Very important!!! Otherwise, the .config file won’t be included when you commit!!!

2. Commit changes to GitHub:

git add .
git commit -m "upd: personal config"
git push origin master

The branch is called master, has a master-servant flavor to it

Pitfalls:#

Enable WIFI before compilation#

If you need to enable WIFI by default for easy management, I searched many tutorials online but they were useless, mostly from around 2015 with no reference value. I figured it out myself: Go to the package/lean/default-settings/files/ directory, edit the file zzz-default-settings Comment out these two lines by adding # at the beginning:

sed -i '/option disabled/d' /etc/config/wireless
sed -i '/set wireless.radio${devidx}.disabled/d' /lib/wifi/mac80211.sh

Github Actions Compilation#

Online guides still say “submit a Release and it will automatically trigger Github Actions” but that didn’t work for me, so I needed to make some changes:

• When using Github Actions for compilation, remember to go to the Workflow page and enable the Workflow, and also enable OpenWrt-CI (because Workflows in forked repositories are disabled by default)

• Also modify the repository’s .github/workflows/openwrt-ci.yml, changing the cron task at the beginning (line 10) to the following to allow manual workflow triggering:

  on:
    repository_dispatch:
    workflow_dispatch:

  plaintext

It will take about two hours, but what does that have to do with me since I’m using Github’s resources

Modifying various miscellaneous settings#

• Change the default theme

  sed -i "s/luci-theme-bootstrap/luci-theme-material/g" feeds/luci/collections/luci/Makefile

  plaintext

 (Nowadays people's aesthetics seem to prefer the argon theme, anyway this should match what you installed in the `luci-themes` section of your `.config`)
- Add compiler information

sed -i “s/OpenWrt /TheUnknownThing build $(TZ=UTC-8 date ”+%Y.%m.%d”) @ OpenWrt /g” package/lean/default-settings/files/zzz-default-settings

You probably don't want to keep "TheUnknownThing" as your builder name, change it to something else.
- Modify the default management address
The default management address is `192.168.1.1`, if it conflicts with your upstream network segment, you can modify it

sed -i ‘s/192.168.1.1/192.168.2.1/g’ package/base-files/files/bin/config_generate

This changes it to `192.168.2.1`



[1]: https://github.com/coolsnowwolf/lede
[2]: https://www.right.com.cn/forum/thread-3682029-1-1.html