Prepare OpenWRT 23.05.x on Ubuntu 22.04

Prepare The System

• This page will cover the preparation work for you to be able to build OpenWRT with the MESHdesk packages included.
• The SDK and build process will require ~30-40G of hard drive space.
• Install the required packages to ensure the SDK can build the firmware.

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

Location for the SDK

• Create the location for the SDK
• Our suggestion is to create a folder that will indicate the version of the firmware you'll be building.
• You need to do this as a normal Linux user (not root).
• Here we create a folder for the 23.05.2 release.

# Create the working directory 
mkdir 23.05.2
# Change to our working directory 
cd 23.05.2

Checkout the SDK

• Do a clean checkout of the OpenWrt repository.

git clone https://git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git

• This repository has various branches. To see which branches are available and which one we are currently set to use, issue the following command.

#We may first need to change our directory to the openwrt directory
cd openwrt
git branch -a
#Also to see the tags 
git tag -l

• We will be checking out the v23.05.2 tag.

git checkout v23.05.2

• Confirm that this v23.05.2 is now checked out.

git branch

• Update the package feeds.

./scripts/feeds update

Install the required packages

• Ensure the following packages are installed since they are required by the MESHdesk package.

./scripts/feeds install coova-chilli
./scripts/feeds install luasocket
./scripts/feeds install libuci-lua
./scripts/feeds install curl
./scripts/feeds install -a -p routing 
./scripts/feeds install iwinfo
./scripts/feeds install luci
./scripts/feeds install luci-theme-material
./scripts/feeds install mosquitto
./scripts/feeds install lua-mosquitto
#For backward compatibility in 23.05 with older Luci libs
./scripts/feeds install luci-compat
#Add the iptables translator package to translate iptables to nftables
./scripts/feeds install  iptables-nft
#Add these Luci packages
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-nixio
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-jsonc
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-json
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-httpprotoutils
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-httpclient
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-base
#If you are going to implement OpenVPN tunnels
./scripts/feeds install openvpn-openssl

• Everything is now prepared for us to add the MESHdesk package.

OpenWRT 23.05.x with MESHdesk packages