Support for the archer a7 has been merged yesterday, so you can try an official snapshot build as well:
Looks like there's a good amount of duplicate efforts.
The commit that slh is referencing: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/1e4ee63cc8d1889a78b539a5ed7be8d56e9b976f
There's also an open pull request out there:
And right after I got the case taken off! 
It flashed but I haven't found it on the lan yet. I thought OpenWRT would come up on 192.168.1.1 but it doesn't appear to be there. TP-link's 192.168.0.1 doesn't work either. Nor the local address I assigned to it when it was running TP-link's firmware.
Some more experimenting to do!
Just to be sure, you are trying ping and/ or ssh, not your web browser (development snapshots don't include luci by default).
It doesn't answer broadcast pings. Just tried ssh and it's asking for the root password. Which is not set?
forgot the "root@" part! (It's getting late here!)
I have a BusyBox shell! Now I just have to remember how to configure the thing from the shell. I'm spoiled by the GUI.
Or build my own full image from the sources. And then remember how to to the upgrade.
Like I said, I haven't touched my Buffalo WZR-600DHP running BB in years! So I've forgotten a few things.
Connect the archer a7 with its WAN port to one of the LAN ports of your current router, the defaults are to request an IP address via DHCP and should get it online without any kind of configuration. Once you provided internet access for it opkg update && opkg install luci will provide you with the normal webinterface.
Ah, but I want to run it as a local LAN only bridge. So I changed the IP address to my local network's static address. I can login via ssh at that local static address. I added a 'gateway' option to /etc/config/network and 'netstat -rn' says routing is correct:
root@WAP3:~# netstat -rn
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
0.0.0.0 10.11.12.2 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 br-lan
10.11.12.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 br-lan
root@WAP3:~#
But 'opkg update' can't find any of the servers. Seems like I've had this problem before.
/etc/resolv.conf has the DNS server as the localhost. Once I changed that, I can find the opkg list.
And now I've been cut off by a 3 post limit so I won't be able to contribute to the A7 work anymore. 
The procedure depicted above, using dhcp, is the most simple way to install a webinterface on OpenWrt - how you configure it afterwards is another issue (you can invoke firstboot to get to the original state).
Just got an Archer A7 (hardware v5.0) and it worked out of the box with snapshot firmware build.
Thanks everyone!
Is there any rough idea when this might be available in a stable build? I'm not really comfortable using a snapshot.
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Just got an Archer A7 (v5) and it worked fine. Flashed the snapshot build that @slh linked. Power cycled my modem to get internet, then SSH'd into 192.168.1.1 and installed luci (opkg update && opkg install luci).
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Just bought a A7 v5, updated to latest stock firmware Archer A7(US)_V5_181210 and installed the snapshot r9278-39273b8 via web interface without any issues.
Downside of a snapshot is you have to update opkg package list daily, or you will hit a hashsum mismatch error 
That's a bit alarming. Is that true if you only install luci or is it true if you install several other packages?
Simply put, it happens for almost every package, but that won't cause any obvious problems.
However, if you were using packages that relying on kernel mods (or k-mod-xxx), like fuse or 6-in-4, you should install them as soon as possible. As later when the new snapshots (and their corresponding packages) are released, opkg may report updated kernel mods incompatible with currently installed kernel.
That's good to know because I very nearly installed this on an A7 for my 86 year old mother and then left town. Now I will wait and exchange this A7 with my own C7 so that she can have something more reliable!
@Bunbury911 OpenWrt != dd-wrt
This is the OpenWrt forum.
Please ask this question in the dd-wrt forum.
hi there! can you help me to install gui to be able to roll back to stock or configure setting on the router? I an newbie to all this staff. I got a7 v5.0, and i installed this software over stock firmware, but now i can't configure anything
ttps://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/ath79/generic/openwrt-ath79-generic-tplink_archer-a7-v5-squashfs-factory.bin