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In certain scenarios it might be interesting to automate the OpenWrt Imagebuilder process. With this role you can do this. It will not only build the designated Image for your specific devices, but it will also:
The ansible host you plan to build your images on you need to prepare to this documentation accordingly.
It is an ideal method to automate your build process and to automate upgrading your OpenWrt devices with a new firmware release. This makes the whole process hassle free, since you don't need to install packages afterwards or resize your partition manually.
For larger partitions you will need plenty of space on your build machine. For an image root partition size of 11 GiB it took over 70 GiB of space on the building machine. On a 100G machine I was not able to build a 15G image.
This space is largely freed, after build is finished.
For larger partitions you will also need plenty of RAM, otherwise you might get the below error.
dd: memory exhausted by input buffer of size
This is an example playbook for the ansible_openwrtimagebuilder role.
---
- hosts: tags_openwrt-imagebuilder
pre_tasks:
- name: combine default zones with manual settings
set_fact:
openwrt_firewall_zonesdefault: "{{ openwrt_firewall_zonesdefault | combine(openwrt_firewall_zones_mysite, recursive=true) }}"
when: openwrt_firewall_zones_mysite is defined
vars:
openwrt_imagebuilder_builddir: "/home/jochen/openwrt_imagebuilder"
openwrt_imagebuilder_outputdir: "/home/jochen/openwrt_imagebuilder_images"
openwrt_acme_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_babeld_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_batmanadv_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_bmx7_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_dhcp_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_dropbear_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_firewall_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_network_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_packages_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_restic_runimagebuilder: true
openwrt_services_runimagebuilder: true
gather_facts: no
connection: local
serial: 1
#become: true
tasks:
- name: run imagebuilder preparations
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtimagebuilder
tasks_from: prepare
- name: run acme
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtacme
- name: run dhcp
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtdhcp
- name: run dropbear
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtdropbear
- name: run firewall
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtfirewall
- name: run network
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtnetwork
- name: run restic
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtrestic
- name: run system
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtsystem
- name: run imagebuilder build
ansible.builtin.import_role:
name: imp1sh.ansible_openwrt.ansible_openwrtimagebuilder
tasks_from: build
It's important to run the prepare task first. Next come your own choice of Ansible roles for OpenWrt from my collection. At the end the build task needs to run.
If you make use of the firewall role in which you might want to merge zones, place it in the pretask, like above.
If you don't adjust the openwrt_imagebuilder_builddir variable, the path /tmp/openwrt_imagebuilder will be used for building. The variable openwrt_imagebuilder_outputdir defines where the final images will be put. If you don't adjust, it will be in /tmp/openwrt_imagebuilder_images. The images will be named after the hostname in Ansible and will be compressed (tar.gz.)
You can specify the image for your system by setting this variable openwrt_imagebuilder_downloadurl. If you don't specify, the default x86 imagebuilder URL will be used. Here is an example url link for the Ubiquiti Edgerouter X.
For the build process you can specify kernel variables like in Buildroot. Here you can also set the partition size, e.g:
openwrt_imagebuilder_kernelvars:
- name: "CONFIG_TARGET_KERNEL_PARTSIZE"
value: 32
- name: "CONFIG_TARGET_ROOTFS_PARTSIZE"
value: 900
There are limits to partition size see also. I successfully tested image sizes up to 15G.
There are some roles, e.g. openwrt_restic that need to run on a deployed system so they can function. Always let Ansible run on the target device, after you deployed your firmware.