Connectivity Manager

D-Bus service for managing connectivity.

Connectivity Manager exposes a D-Bus interface for managing connectivity that is supposed to be easy to use for implementing graphical user interfaces. A backend abstraction exists in the daemon to allow for changing implementation without modifying the D-Bus interface.

Connectivity Manager is in early stages of development and currently only supports connecting to Wi-Fi access points. In the near future support for Bluetooth, VPN, different user profiles etc. will be added.

Dependencies

• ConnMan (if built with ConnMan backend)
• gdbus-codegen-glibmm
• glibmm (2.56)
• googletest (1.8.1, for tests, optional)

Building

Meson is used for building. To build simply run:

meson build
ninja -C build

Installing and Running

After building, installation can be performed by running:

sudo ninja -C build install

By default this will install under /usr/local. To change this pass --prefix when invoking meson or meson configure, e.g. meson build --prefix=/usr.

systemctl daemon-reload must be run for systemd to notice the newly installed service file. The service will now start when a D-Bus call is made to it on the system bus. It can also be started manually by running systemctl start connectivity-manager.

It is possible to run the daemon directly from the build directory and on the session bus, which might facilitate testing and debugging during development. To do this run:

export DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS

And then run the built daemon executable directly from the build directory.

Running Tests

Tests can be run with:

meson test -C build

"No tests defined." is printed if the required version of googletest could not be found.

Code Checking

Clang-Format and Clang-Tidy are used for code style checking and "linting". Clang's static analyzer checks are run as part of Clang-Tidy as well. A script exists to simplify running these tools. After building, simply run:

tools/check . build

Note that different versions of clang-format and clang-tidy may give different results. See tools/ci/Dockerfile for what versions are run in the CI system.

The CI system also makes sure that the code compiles without any warnings. To turn warnings into errors when building locally, pass -Dwerror=true when invoking meson or meson configure.

Command Line Interface

cmcli is a command line tool that can be used to interact with the Connectivity Manager daemon. It was mainly developed as a means to test the D-Bus interface without a graphical UI. Help summary:

$ cmcli -h
Usage:
  cmcli [OPTION…] [COMMAND]

Commands ('[COMMAND] -h/--help' for details):
  monitor             Monitor changes
  wifi                Wi-Fi operations

Help Options:
  -h, --help       Show help options

Application Options:
  --version        Print version and exit

More help for a specific command can be obtained by adding -h or --help after the command.

$ cmcli wifi -h
Usage:
  cmcli wifi [OPTION…] [COMMAND]

Commands:
  enable          Enable Wi-Fi
  disable         Disable Wi-Fi
  status          Show Wi-Fi status and access points
  connect         Connect to Wi-Fi access point
  disconnect      Disconnect from Wi-Fi access point
  enable-hotspot  Enable Wi-Fi hotspot
  disable-hotspot Disable Wi-Fi hotspot

Help Options:
  -h, --help           Show help options

Application Options:
  -s, --ssid           SSID for connect, disconnect or enable-hotspot
  -p, --passphrase     Hotspot passphrase for enable-hotspot

For example, to connect to a Wi-Fi Access Point with cmcli, first run cmcli wifi status to display current Wi-Fi status.

$ cmcli wifi status
Wi-Fi Status:

  Available: Yes
  Enabled  : Yes

  Hotspot Enabled   : No
  Hotspot Name/SSID : ""
  Hotspot Passphrase: ""

  Access Points (* = connected):
    AnAccessPoint (Strength: 89)
    AnotherOne (Strength: 65)
    YetAnotherOne (Strength: 59)
    ...

If Wi-Fi is not enabled run cmcli wifi enable to enable it. If Wi-Fi was just enabled it might take a while for access points to show up in the list. Just run cmcli wifi status again after a short while to give the scanning of nearby access points a chance to finish.

Use the connect subcommand and --ssid option to connect to an access point.

$ cmcli wifi connect --ssid AnAccessPoint

A password will be prompted for if one is required. cmcli will exit when the access point has been connected to or an error has occurred, in which case an error message should have been printed.

License and Copyright

Copyright © 2019 Luxoft Sweden AB

The source code in this repository is subject to the terms of the MPL-2.0 license, please see included "LICENSE" file for details. License information for any other files is either explicitly stated or defaults to the MPL-2.0 license.