After some experimentation with the RaspAP, I decided to write up a simple web interface for it so that when hostapd started broadcasting, I could use a simple web page rather than ssh to control the wifi and hostapd on the Raspberry Pi. The distribution I used was Raspbian Server Edition once again.
I started off by installing lighttpd and php5
apt-get install lighttpd php5-cgi
After that, I enabled php for lighttpd and restarted it for the settings to take effect.
sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php
/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
Now, comes the fun part.
For security reasons, the www-data user which lighttpd runs under is not allowed to start or stop daemons, or run commands like ifdown and ifup, all of which I wanted my page to do.
So what I have done, is added the www-data user to the sudoers file, but with restrictions on what commands the user can run.
The line appears in /etc/sudoers like this –
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/ifdown wlan0,/sbin/ifup wlan0,/bin/cat /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf,/bin/cp /tmp/wifidata /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf,/sbin/wpa_cli scan_results,/sbin/wpa_cli scan,/bin/cp /tmp/hostapddata /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf,/etc/init.d/hostapd start,/etc/init.d/hostapd stop,/etc/init.d/dnsmasq start,/etc/init.d/dnsmasq stop,/bin/cp /tmp/dhcpddata /etc/dnsmasq.conf
Notice I’ve restricted the www-data user to only be able to run the exact commands in the sudoers file
This means that the www-data can only take down, bring up, and show the configuration of wlan0 for example.
After the sudoers file has been modified, the script can now do what it needs to do.
I have a very very rough version written up so far, but it’s not available to download yet.
Here are some screenshots of what it’ll be able to do though ! 🙂
WiFi Information screen
WiFI Client connection screen
WiFi Hotspot setup screen
I’m in the process of prettying up the GUI but in the meantime, this is functional enough 🙂
I’ll get the demo up and running soon enough too ! 🙂
**Update**
I have released the PHP files for this – Please check this post for details.
17 Responses to “Script : Web Configuration Page for Raspberry Pi”
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Hi.
Just been reading through this and would quite like to give it a go. Is the GUI available to download at all?
I’ll be making it available shortly. I’m rather ashamed of the code at the moment haha, so I’ll clean it up before posting it online to download 🙂
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Great Tool – I like it! Pretty cool !
Short question: If I want to open/close an openVPN Connection with a Button or A HREF link – how do I do it?
The command: sudo /etc/init.d/openvpn start
and
sudo /etc/init.d/openvpn stop
Thanks and best,
Tobi
You would need to modify the sudo file to allow the page to run those commands, and then create buttons to actually run the commands.
Hola!
Comentarte que es una aplicación web funcional. Gracias por compartirla. 😀
Solo una pregunta. Esta versión Beta aun no permite realizar los cambios de parámetros como: Cambiar SSID, contraseña, tipo de seguridad?
En general, esta muy bien!
This page is a very very early version, and I haven’t put any work into it since I built it due to a lack of time.
I don’t remember if you can change those settings. I thought you could but I could be wrong.
I’ll put this onto github sometime, and then everyone can modify it and improve it !
Thanks for replying! Yeah, I’ve been looking for to change those settings, since I need it to work as soon as possible, I’m running late about it and I’m a begginer in this stuff. If you could share the modified version I would appreciate it so much.
Thanks in advance!
You’re like a coding genius!
I know enough HTML to hack out a webpage, barely. But I need to learn this PHP stuff since It’s what I need for my project. Thank you for posting this It gives me a lot to break, fix and learn.
No problems. Have Fun 🙂
Hi!
This is great, but I get an error in this line:
system(‘sudo cp /tmp/WLANdata /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf’,$returnval);
He cant copy the WLANdata file to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.
I can do this on the command line.
Maybe someone has an idea, where the problem is?
Thank you!
Have you configured sudo as per instructions in the post?
I was looking for this, but only for lan not wifi
Whats the possibility of changing it for lan, im reading all the code but not sure were to start (very new to php)
Im looking at a info page, and a configuration page to set ip, netmask and dns
Just point me in the direction of how to modify the code and ill be a very happy chappy
Thanks
Robert
You could have a look at the github repo @ https://github.com/billz/raspap-webgui
Hi where can I download the codes for this Raspberry web app?