Minimal TUI Wi-Fi Manager

Good news! If you don't want to install third party daemons, gooey GUI things, or bloat just so you can connect to a wireless access point, then don't worry, Linux has all the CLI tools necessary to create a minimal on-demand TUI shell script thing to connect to, and manage these very Wi-Fi connections. The following info is for Debian, however the approach will be the same for other distros, including BSD operating systems that will differ mostly for some of the network commands.

How does it work?

The things that mater

• /etc/network/interfaces — network interface configuration for ifup and ifdown
• iw — show/manipulate wireless devices and their configuration
• wpa_cli — WPA command line client
• wpa_supplicant and wpa_supplicant.conf — Wi-Fi Protected Access client and IEEE 802.1X supplicant and its configuration file
• fzf — command line fuzzy finder

Use case

The use case here is as follow:

• don't connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot unless I explicitly ask the COMPUTAR to do so
• if I need to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot, the COMPUTAR should give me a list of the visible ones
• a user-friendly™ interface with fuzzy search should help me tell the COMPUTER which hotspot I want to connect to
• if the Wi-Fi hotspot is already known, connect to it
• if the Wi-Fi hotspot is unknown, ask for the password, save it, and connect to it

Note: if the Wi-Fi hotspot needs to be configured with specific settings (for instance for specific key management settings of for open networks), it is necessary to edit wpa_supplicant.conf manually. The rationale is that I need this so rarely needed, that quickly editing a file with obscure settings outweighs by far the need to make a more complicated shell script to handle such corner case :)

Config and script

/etc/network/interfaces

Edit /etc/network/interfaces and tweak according to your network name (here wlp2s0).

auto wlp2s0 iface wlp2s0 inet manual

 wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

iface default inet dhcp