Programmatically connecting to a wifi network in Linux

Question

There are multiple questions regarding this functionality for Android or iOS, but I am attempting to do this on Linux (OpenWrt 15.05 to be specific). I want to scan for wireless networks, present the list to the user, have them select one and send the username/password to the network.

I wrote a quick C program using iw_scan from the wireless_tools package so I can see the wireless networks, but I am having issues trying to determine how to connect to a wireless network. iwconfig from the same package just appears to modify an already existing connection.

I have spent a few hours surfing the web thinking there has got to be a package that already does this since it is such a common use case. Anyone know of one?

Thanks.

Answer 1

wpa_supplicant

Take a look at wpa_supplicant package. It includes wpa_supplicant daemon that can be controlled via wpa_cli and wpa_gui utilities or D-Bus API.

Programs like wicd and Network Manager uses wpa_supplicant internally.

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NetworkManager

You can also use D-Bus API or command line interface (nmcli) for NetworkManager. It provides a higher level abstraction than wpa_supplicant does.