How to make luci network > wireless tab vanish

For Developers
1

Problem Description

I need to make the luci > network > wireless tab dissapear conditionally based on whether the user has installed a certain network card or not. This is necessary because UCI is unable to manage certain cards and I don't want the user messing up the config.

I am able to make my custom config tab appear conditionally, but making the standard wireless tab dissapear is tricky. I understand that the presence of /etc/config/wireless on the system causes that tab to appear. But I don't want to delete that from the system in case a compatible card is used. Below is a snippet from my current approach which is a part of the luasrc/controller/halow.lua file in my custom luci app package.

    local usb_check = os.execute("lsusb | grep -q '<card ID>'")

    if usb_check == 0 then
        local nw = entry({"admin", "network", "wireless"}, nil, nil)
        nw.target = nil
        nw.title  = nil

I've also tried this approach

        local nw = luci.dispatcher.node("admin", "network", "wireless")
        if nw then
            nw.target = nil
            nw.title  = nil
            nw.order  = 100

But all that does is push it to the bottom of the network section.

I've also tried this which does nothing.

        entry({"admin", "network", "wireless"}, nil, nil, 60).dependent = true

Does anyone know how to make this tab dissapear completely? Is my custom luci app's controller file the wrong place to be doing this?

Thank you

2

I also tried this and it does not work

        local nw = luci.dispatcher.node("admin", "network", "wireless")
        if nw then
            nw.ignore = true 
        end
3

truncate /etc/config/wireless and add empty file to sysupgrade conf

4

is the choice made at runtime or during compilation ??

also you appear to be using the legacy luci ... i assume luci-compat ??

You may want to have a look at my old Luci-app-multi-user package to see how to hook into the menu displays and add conditions

from what i recall, you''l need to set the condition in the index.lua, then check for said condition in the dispatcher where the pages are rendered ... (added to the index list).

with a slight adjustment this should get it done ...

5

So this is a runtime thing. The idea being that once the device is in service a user can hot-swap wifi cards and behavior will change depending on the card installed. I was able to get this work in a sort of hacky way. I learned that it is the presence of /etc/config/wireless that makes the network > wireless tab appear. So, I wrote an init.d service that hides or reinserts /etc/config/wireless on boot.

#!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common

START=15  # Run early, before LuCI initializes

start() {
  
    if lsusb | grep -q '<Card id>'; then
        if [ -f /etc/config/wireless ]; then
            mv /etc/config/wireless /etc/config/wireless.bak
        fi
    else
        if [ -f /etc/config/wireless.bak ]; then
            mv /etc/config/wireless.bak /etc/config/wireless
        fi
    fi
}