LuCI – Technical Reference

• See also the LuCI Essentials page

• LuCI Wiki
• LuCI Documentation
• LuCI Github

LuCI was founded in March 2008 as “FFLuCI” as part of the efforts to create a port of the Freifunk-Firmware from the OpenWrt branch White Russian to its successor branch Kamikaze.

The initial reason for this project was the absence of a free, clean, extensible and easily maintainable web user interface for embedded devices. While most similar configuration interfaces make heavy use of the Shell-scripting language, LuCI:

• uses the Lua programming language and
• splits the interface up into logical parts like models and views, uses object-oriented libraries and templating.

That ensures better performance, smaller installation size, faster runtimes and simple maintainability.

Meanwhile LuCI evolved from a MVC-Webframework to a collection of several libraries, applications and user interfaces with general purpose for Lua programmers while the focus still remains on the web user interface which also became an official part of OpenWrt releases since OpenWrt 'Kamikaze' 8.09.

• uci (including libuci-lua)

• Making a dependent service restart after change in LuCI

luci and luci-ssl are meta-packages. Here you see what they comprise, the sizes are in Bytes compiled for the ar71xx platform. They should differ too much from binaries compiled for other architectures. Also note, that with JFFS2 it is not possible to precisely predict the occupied space.

In case you want to use a different web server than uhttpd and not install uhttpd at all, do not install the meta-package because it includes it. Install the individual components instead and a web server of your choice. The article webserver shows you some choices from the repos.