Hacker News Reader

Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

Really enjoy OpenWrt. One complaint/suggestion is they really need official Ansible support or some better way at automating deployments. I was able to create something myself for the time being but having official support would make things so much better.

View on HN

There have been efforts in that direction:

- https://github.com/gekmihesg/ansible-openwrt

- https://github.com/NN708/ansible-openwrt

and even

- https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit...

Are they not sufficient?

Setting up a router involves more than starting or stopping services, and again I am looking for something officially supported. I was able to use the UBUS API to do this but unfortunately the unofficial modules or roles appeared to use more convoluted methods.

"ansible support"

You need python on the router, most of my openwrt routiers don't have enough ram for that.

No, you don’t:

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/network/getting_star...

No you don't and even if you did the amount of RAM is not really an issue for more modern devices, but I agree Python isn't ideal. However, OpenWrt already has a capable API but no one has built the integration yet.

That sounds awfully like something OpenWISP should already be capable of.

OpenWISP is for creating configuration packages and they still have to be deployed somehow, also it was lacking last time I checked. It also is not a single lightweight package but recommended to be deployed as a separate server. Hardly the same if you ask me. What I have now uses SSH and the UBUS API and I don't need to setup an entirely separate server or infrastructure to configure a single network device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com