ubus (Rust)

Work in progress

This is a pure Rust library for implementing OpenWRT ubus clients.

Goals

• Minimal bloat
• Few dependencies
• Zero allocations inside main code
• no_std where possible
• Don't panic!

Supported

• Unix-Domain-Socket + Type-Length-Value protocol support
• blob TLV format support
• High-level abstraction for lookup command

TODO

• High level abstraction for call command
• High level abstraction for subscribe/unsubscribe commands
• High level support for network interface objects
• HTTP(S) + JSON protocol support

Getting Started

Local Execution

On OpenWrt version 24.10 and later, you can use OpenSSH's UNIX domain socket forwarding feature to execute code on your development machine:

ssh root@openwrtrouter -L /path/to/local/ubus.sock:/var/run/ubus/ubus.sock

You will either need to use /path/to/local/ubus.sock in your code, or create a suitable symbolic link.

With OpenWrt versions 23.05 and earlier, you must install the openssh-server package to use domain socket forwarding over ssh, because older versions of dropbear lack that feature.

Cross Compilation

Cross-compilation is relatively straight-forward unless your project depends on external C libraries.

Until OpenWrt gains full Rust support, to cross-compile for your intended router, install a suitable rust target in your development environment. Which one is needed depends on your target's CPU (discoverable with uname -m), e.g. for aarch64, you can use rustup target install aarch64-unknown-linux-musl.

CARGO_TARGET_AARCH64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_MUSL_LINKER=rust-lld cargo build --release --target aarch64-unknown-linux-musl --example lookup

…will build a binary in:

./target/aarch64-unknown-linux-musl/release/examples/lookup