05-view.md ← | → 07-warnings.md
Google search for the following (where THING is the thing you are trying to figure out). This will search the LuCI listserv and openwrt forum, which have a ton of helpful tips, etc hidden throughout.
THING site:https://lists.subsignal.org/pipermail/luci/
THING luci site:https://forum.openwrt.org/
You can also search the LuCI and nixio API's for technical terms that might show you a existing function in a library you have not looked in.
THING site:http://luci.subsignal.org/api/
create the following script in /www/cgi-bin/luci.dbg and make it executable:
#!/usr/bin/lua
require "nixio"
dbg = io.open("/tmp/luci.req", "w")
for k, v in pairs(nixio.getenv()) do
dbg:write(string.format("export %s=%q\n", k, v))
end
dbg:write("/www/cgi-bin/luci\n")
dbg:close()
nixio.exec("/www/cgi-bin/luci")
Now change the url of the broken page from .../luci/... to .../luci.dbg/... and reload.
The script should create a file "/tmp/luci.req" which you can use to reproduce the same request on the command line:
root@OpenWrt:~# sh /tmp/luci.req
In order to develop on the device in 10.03+ you will need the lua source to be in text format. There are 2 compilation settings for LuCI, one is a compile-time setting in make menuconfig under
LuCI -> Libraries -> LuCI core libraries -> Build Target.
There you can decide whether the device should have: full source, stripped source or bytecode in the .lua files on the device.
If you selected to have full source or stripped sourcecode, then there is a run-time option luci.ccache.enable which enables or disables a compile-time cache. You can disable this cache by doing
uci set luci.ccache.enable=0
uci commit luci
or by changing the value to 0 directly in /etc/config/luci.
This is a permanent configuration. If you only need to delete the cache for a one-off you can delete /tmp/luci-modulecache after each change.
simply remove /tmp/luci-indexcache.
To permanently disable the menu cache for development purposes, (lua style) comment out the line luci.dispatcher.indexcache = "/tmp/luci-indexcache" in /www/cgi-bin/luci .
--luci.dispatcher.indexcache = "/tmp/luci-indexcache"
Commotion helpers includes a logging function that is useful for basic debugging.
require "commotion_helpers"
log("This is a thing to output")
The logging output is sent to logread.
# logread
user.notice luci: This is a thing to output
The current logger also does tables:
log({a=1})
user.notice luci: {
user.notice luci: a
user.notice luci: :
user.notice luci: 1
user.notice luci: }
If you want to capture just the luci logger output you can grep for only "luci" lines. When combined with tail this can be a powerful way of watching your program.
# logread -f |grep luci
There is a "luci.debug" module, it was originally intended to trace the memory usage of functions but it can also generate a line-by-line call trace. Use it this way:
require "luci.debug".trap_memtrace("l", "/tmp/trace") -- (L, not one)
This should create a file /tmp/trace on each invocation. This is much more comprehensive than the normal log debugging and what Lua offers in its debug api. There is no interactive debugger like gdb as far as I know.
Since you will not be able to run logread at the same time as running the develoment environement you will need to send your logging to the standard error of the development environment itself. To do this you will want to use luci util's dumptable and perror functions.
local util = require "luci.util"
if type(logged_item) == "table" then util.dumptable(logged_item) else util.perror(logged_item) end