Development

If you are planning on developing for the PirateBox, there are some tools that will help you.

The first thing you may want to do is get the build toolchain up and running. With this toolchain you can easily build your own OpenWRT images which allows for developing and quickly building images for testing.

PirateBox is based on OpenWRT and thus is able to use its build helpers. One very powerful feature of the OpenWRT build system are feeds. Feeds basically are collections of packages, they can be local or remote. This allows to easily add new package repositories to be included in the build.

PirateBox has its own feed, which means all you need is the OpenWRT build system and the PirateBox feed and you are good to go.

To give you a kickstart, there are some helper scripts that will set up the development environment for you, help building images and remastering them.

Those script can be found on github in the PirateBox dev environment repository. Once you have cloned the repository you may want to start building your toolchain and your first image for testing. Just run:

make auto_build_stable

This make target will fetch the toolchain, build it and then it will build the stable PirateBox release. Depending on your machine, this can take some time(hours). Make sure to check the README if you run into any problems. There is a detailed description on how to run the build manually and what each of the make targets does.

Once you have your toolchain up and running you may want to start on working on some of the packages. This is where the local feed comes in. A local fees is a directory with packages to be added to your image.