HowTo: Setting up a Development Environment

LuCI provides you the abilitiy to work and develop largely on your host machine giving you a familiar environment with your favorite development tools instead of being forced to develop on the target machine.

The only requirement is you run a Unix based operating system.

Required Software

Make sure you have the following software installed on your host machine:

• GCC, Make (build-essential)
• Lua 5.1.x + development headers (lua5.1, liblua5.1-0-dev)

Getting the source code

Use any of the sources from our Download Section to get the LuCI sourcecode.

Running LuCI

make runhttpd

prepares and compiles LuCI and its dependencies and finally starts the LuCI webserver under  http://localhost:8080/luci.

make run

gives you an overview over other possible run-targets.

Writing Code

While writing code make sure you do not edit any files in the dist-directory of any module or the global host directory. Changes there will be lost as soon as you rerun make. Instead change the files in the luasrc, root, ... directories of the modules and rerun make if you want to test your changes.