$ raspap-webgui

A simple, responsive web interface to control wifi, hostapd and related services on the Raspberry Pi.

This project was inspired by a blog post by SirLagz about using a web page rather than ssh to configure wifi and hostapd settings on the Raspberry Pi. I mostly just prettified the UI by wrapping it in SB Admin 2, a Bootstrap based admin theme. Since then, the project has evolved to include greater control over many aspects of a networked RPi, better security, authentication, support for themes and more.

We'd be curious to hear about how you use this with your own Pi-powered access points. Ping us on Twitter (@billzimmerman, @jrmhaig and @SirLagz). Until then, here are some screenshots:

Contents

• Prerequisites
• Quick installer
• Manual installation
• Optional services
• How to contribute
• License

Prerequisites

You need to install some extra software in order for the Raspberry Pi to act as a WiFi router and access point. If all you're interested in is configuring your RPi as a client on an existing WiFi network, you can skip this step.

There are many guides available to help you select a WiFi adapter, install a compatible driver, configure HostAPD and so on. The details are outside the scope of this project, although I've had consistently good results with the Edimax Wireless 802.11b/g/n nano USB adapter – it's small, cheap and easy to work with.

To configure your RPi as a WiFi router, either of these resources will start you on the right track:

• How-To: Use The Raspberry Pi As A Wireless Access Point/Router Part 1
• How-To: Turn a Raspberry Pi into a WiFi router (uses isc-dhcp-server instead of dnsmasq)

After you complete the intial setup, you'll be able to administer these services using the web UI.

Quick installer

Install RaspAP from your RaspberryPi's shell prompt:

$ wget -q https://git.io/voEUQ -O /tmp/raspap && bash /tmp/raspap

The installer will complete the steps in the manual installation (below) for you.

After the reboot at the end of the installation the wireless network will be configured as an access point as follows:

• IP address: 10.3.141.1
  • Username: admin
  • Password: secret
• DHCP range: 10.3.141.50 to 10.3.141.255
• SSID: raspi-webgui
• Password: ChangeMe

Manual installation

Start off by installing git, lighttpd, php5, hostapd and dnsmasq.

$ sudo apt-get install git lighttpd php5-cgi hostapd dnsmasq

After that, enable PHP for lighttpd and restart it for the settings to take effect.

sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php
sudo service 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 we want our 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. Add the following to the end of /etc/sudoers:

www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/ifdown wlan0
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/ifup wlan0
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/cat /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/cp /tmp/wifidata /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/wpa_cli scan_results
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/wpa_cli scan
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/wpa_cli reconfigure
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/cp /tmp/hostapddata /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/etc/init.d/hostapd start
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/etc/init.d/hostapd stop
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/etc/init.d/dnsmasq start
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/etc/init.d/dnsmasq stop
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/cp /tmp/dhcpddata /etc/dnsmasq.conf
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/shutdown -h now
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/sbin/reboot

Once those modifications are done, git clone the files to /var/www/html. Note: for older versions of Raspbian (before Jessie, May 2016) use /var/www instead.

sudo rm -rf /var/www/html
sudo git clone https://github.com/billz/raspap-webgui /var/www/html

Set the files ownership to www-data user.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

Move the RaspAP configuration file to the correct location

sudo mkdir /etc/raspap
sudo mv /var/www/html/raspap.php /etc/raspap/
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /etc/raspap

Reboot and it should be up and running!

sudo reboot

The default username is 'admin' and the default password is 'secret'.

Optional services

OpenVPN and TOR are two additional services that run perfectly well on the RPi, and are a nice way to extend the usefulness of your WiFi router. I've started on interfaces to administer these services. Not everyone will need them, so for the moment they are disabled by default. You can enable them by changing these options in index.php:

// Optional services, set to true to enable.
define('RASPI_OPENVPN_ENABLED', false );
define('RASPI_TORPROXY_ENABLED', false );

Please note that these are only UI's for now. If there's enough interest I'll complete the funtionality for these optional admin screens.

How to contribute

1. File an issue in the repository, using the bug tracker, describing the contribution you'd like to make. This will help us to get you started on the right foot.
2. Fork the project in your account and create a new branch: your-great-feature.
3. Commit your changes in that branch.
4. Open a pull request, and reference the initial issue in the pull request message.

License

See the LICENSE file.