The wifi Command

This library comes with a command line program for managing and saving your WiFi connections.

Tutorial

This tutorial assumes you are comfortable on the command line. (If you aren’t, perhaps wifi is not quite the right for you.)

First, if you haven’t already, install wifi.

$ pip install wifi

Now, you want to see what networks are available. You can run the scan command to do that.

Note

All of these commands need to run as a superuser.

# wifi scan
-61  SomeNet                  protected
-62  SomeOtherNet             unprotected
-78  zxy-12345                protected
-86  TP-LINK_CB1676           protected
-86  TP-LINK_PocketAP_D8B616  unprotected
-82  TP-LINK_C1DBE8           protected
-86  XXYYYYZZZ                protected
-87  Made Up Name             protected

The scan command returns three bits of data: the signal quality, the SSID and if the network is protected or not. If you want to order the networks by quality, you can pipe the output into sort.

# wifi scan | sort -rn
-61  SomeNet                  protected
-62  SomeOtherNet             unprotected
-78  zxy-12345                protected
-82  TP-LINK_C1DBE8           protected
-86  XXYYYYZZZ                protected
-86  TP-LINK_PocketAP_D8B616  unprotected
-86  TP-LINK_CB1676           protected
-87  Made Up Name             protected

The greater the number, the better the signal.

We decide to use the SomeNet network because that’s the closest one (plus we know the password). We can connect to it directly using the connect command.

# wifi connect --ad-hoc SomeNet
passkey>

The --ad-hoc or -a option allows us to connect to a network that we haven’t configured before. The wifi asks you for a passkey if the network is protected and then it will connect.

If you want to actually save the configuration instead of just connecting once, you can use the add command.

# wifi add some SomeNet
passkey>

some here is a nickname for the network you can use when you want to connect to the network again. Now we can connect to the saved network if you want using the connect command.

# wifi connect some
...

If you wish to see all the saved networks, you can use the list command.

# wifi list
some

Usage

usage: wifi {scan,list,config,add,connect,init} ...

scan

Shows a list of available networks.

usage: wifi scan

list

Shows a list of networks already configured.

usage: wifi list

add, config

Prints or adds the configuration to connect to a new network.

usage: wifi config SCHEME [SSID]
usage: wifi add SCHEME [SSID]

positional arguments:
  SCHEME      A memorable nickname for a wireless network. If SSID is not
              provided, the network will be guessed using SCHEME.
  SSID        The SSID for the network to which you wish to connect. This is
              fuzzy matched, so you don't have to be precise.

connect

Connects to the network corresponding to SCHEME.

usage: wifi connect [-a] SCHEME

positional arguments:
  SCHEME        The nickname of the network to which you wish to connect.

optional arguments:
  -a, --ad-hoc  Connect to a network without storing it in the config file

autoconnect

Searches for saved schemes that are currently available and connects to the first one it finds.

usage: wifi autoconnect

Completion

The wifi command also comes packaged with completion for bash. If you want to write completion for your own shell, wifi provides an interface for extracting completion information. Please see the wifi-completion.bash and bin/wifi files for more information.