UCI – Unified configuration interface is a tool used in openwrt in order to configure the system. You can either change the configuration files by hand or change the full configuration with UCI. I strongly recommend to use it instead of using the configuration files directly. Here I list the basic commands and I will give some examples of usage:

 

$ uci show	Shows the full list of entries in UCI.
$ uci show SECTION	Shows an specific section’s entries inside UCI.
$ uci set section.attribute=value	Sets the attribute of the section to one value.
$ uci commit	Commits all the changes and save them.
$ uci export file.conf	Saves UCI’s configuration inside a configuration file.
$ uci import file.conf	Loads UCI’s configuration from a configuration file.

 

The first example about how to use UCI was in the section where we configured the usb as root file system. Here I attach the example we made:

Configure the fstab to mount the usb drive as default mount point:   Set the target mount point to blank(it is going to be the rootfs) $ uci set fstab.@mount[0].target= Set the type of filesystem to be mounted to ext2: $ uci set fstab.@mount[0].fstype=ext2 Set the mounting point as enabled: $ uci set fstab.@mount[0].enabled=1 Set the mounting point as the root file system: $ uci set fstab.@mount[0].is_rootfs=1 Define the new options for the mounting point: $ uci set fstab.@mount[0].options=rw,noatime,async Commit all the changes: $ uci commit

 

In this case to see the fstab configuration inside uci we should use “$ uci show fstab”:

root@OpenWrt:~# uci show fstab fstab.automount=global fstab.automount.from_fstab=1 fstab.automount.anon_mount=1 fstab.autoswap=global fstab.autoswap.from_fstab=1 fstab.autoswap.anon_swap=0 fstab.@mount[0]=mount fstab.@mount[0].target=/home fstab.@mount[0].device=/dev/sda1 fstab.@mount[0].fstype=ext4 fstab.@mount[0].options=rw,sync fstab.@mount[0].enabled=0 fstab.@mount[0].enabled_fsck=0 fstab.@swap[0]=swap fstab.@swap[0].device=/dev/sda2 fstab.@swap[0].enabled=0

 

Then we just set the configuration as we want and finally commit the changes with “$ uci commit”.

 

There are other configuration options such as the wireless and the network. I strongly recommend you to take a look with “$uci show” and see what is in there.

 

Again, I hope you found this article useful.

 

David.