picchioni / imagebuilder

Imagebuilder for all GL.iNet routers.

Imagebuilder

Imagebuilder for GL.iNet devices. The Image Builder (previously called the Image Generator) is a pre-compiled environment suitable for creating custom images without the need for compiling them from source.

System Requirements

• x86_64 platform
• Ubuntu or another linux distro
• Download the build environment:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential git-core libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev gawk flex quilt libssl-dev xsltproc libxml-parser-perl mercurial bzr ecj cvs unzip git wget

Usage

To build all the router firmwares, run ./gl_image -a. To build a specific firmware, run ./gl_image -p <image_name>. You can list all the images names by running ./gl_image -l.

Run ./gl_image -h to see more details and advanced options.

Complete Usage Example

To make an image for the Mifi with some extra packages included:

git clone https://github.com/gl-inet/imagebuilder.git
cd imagebuilder
./gl_image -p mifi -e "openssh-sftp-server nano htop"

The compiled image becomes: bin/gl-mifi/openwrt-mifi-ar71xx-generic-gl-mifi-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

For other firmwares, the compiled firmware file is in /bin/<device_name>/.

Advanced Configuration

All the GL device package configuration is done with the images.json file. The following options control the configuration:

packages: The default packages included in all firmwares
profiles: Configuration for each firmware
{
    <image_name>:
    {
        profile: The name of the device. Run "make info" for a list of available devices.
        version: Firmware version. Generates a version file called /etc/glversion and overrides /etc/opk/distfeeds.conf with the version number
        imagebuilder: Image builder folder
        packages: Packages in the firmware. Variables include the default packages. Add the package name to include. "-" appended to the package name excludes the package, eg: "-mwan3"
        files: Files folder, it allows customized configuration files to be included in images built with Image Generator, all files from the folder will be copied into device's rootfs("/").
    }
}

Assuming that we have a helloworld.ipk (created by the sdk), and we want to create a clean customized firmware for our AR150 device that includes this ipk, here is an example of a user-defined configuration file. We name it myfirst.json:

{
    "profiles":
    {
        "helloworld":
	{
            "profile": "gl-ar150",
            "version": "3.001",
            "imagebuilder": "3.0/openwrt-imagebuilder-ar71xx-generic",
            "packages": "luci helloworld"
        }
    }
}

Placing the helloworld.ipk in the glinet/ar71xx folder and running ./gl_image -c myfirst.json -p helloworld will build our clean image with our helloworld.ipk included.