I may not even be asking in the right spot but here it goes.
I currently have several Google Wifi devices that were given to me when my father upgraded his network. Recently, I learned that someone was kind enough to build an openwrt snapshot image for this hardware. I've installed it on a couple unused devices as a test and it works great! I even have a mesh set up.
The only issue I run into is because it's a snapshot, things tend to progress in their dependencies. So, while I can install the image and get several packages installed all at once, if I come back a few weeks later to install another package, it may run into dependency issues such as needing a newer kernel which would require updating the firmware and reinstalling all packages. This can get tedious.
I would love it if I could figure out how to build a 22.03 release image for this device to avoid this problem. I may be way out of my depth on this. I have some programming experience and a whole lot of linux/bash experience (daily driver for ~18 years) but not sure where to begin with this.
So, someone was kind enough to point me in the direction of the custom firmware builder. Is there a way to pull a plain text list of all packages currently installed so you can just copy/paste into the packages to include when you build a factory.bin? I tried opkg list over ssh but it seems to return a whole lot more than the packages currently installed.
Like @Pilot6 said attended-sysupgrade (install luci-app-attendedsysupgrade for LuCI support) or auc (opkg install auc) for command line.
Here are some commands I commonly use:
auc -c for checking current status auc -b SNAPSHOT to build and install latest snapshot including all of your existing packages auc -b 22.03 -B 22.03.0-rc6 likewise for RC6 and so on
Because I have 4 more units to flash and the method is a bit of a pain without having to also install Luci and all other needed packages on each one. It would be nice to be able to just go in with a prepared image to flash to each and then just configure them without having to install anything after flash.
Yeah, I figured out auc with the help of someone else. Just looking for a speedy way to flash all my Google WiFi units quickly with the needed packages already. I still have 4 that are running the OEM firmware. They're also running the house WiFi and I would need to get them swapped quickly to minimize disruption to the household.
That does indeed list all installed packages as plain text without the extra stuff! I just have a few more to install to have the full list of packages to run with!
This is actually great because then I can have everything needed to get my additional units off of OEM firmware with minimal fuss! Thanks everyone for the help!