Package management

[GitGerby]

Providing a method of defining packages to install on devices via templates would be helpful for mass deployments. Including an additional template or option that added a configurable cron job to devices that updated all installed packages would also be helpful.

[okraits]

You can deploy a script which install the packages you need. You can also deploy a cronjob as a file I think.

[GitGerby]

That's of course an option, but having a declarative configuration of packages to install and optionally keep up to date seems more in keeping with a configuration management solution.

[nemesifier]

There's many things that can go wrong with this approach on OpenWrt. Sometimes packages fail to install due to mistatch in kernel modules or kernel dependencies. The best practice is to build your own firmware image which has all the packages you need. Also because if you reset the firmware to factory defaults you would lose all the packages and would need to reinstall them from scratch.