ffmap-backend gathers information on the batman network by invoking batctl and batadv-vis as root (via sudo) and has this information placed into a target directory as the file "nodes.json" and also updates the directory "nodes" with graphical representations of uptimes and the number of clients connecting.

The target directory is suggested to host all information for interpreting those node descriptions, e.g. as provided by https://github.com/ffnord/ffmap-d3.git . When executed without root privileges, we suggest to grant sudo permissions within wrappers of those binaries, so no further changes are required in other scripts:

$ cat < $HOME/batctl
#!/bin/sh
exec sudo /usr/sbin/batctl $*
EOCAT

and analogously for batadv-vis. The entry for /etc/sudoers could be whateveruser ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/batctl,/usr/sbin/batadv-vis,/usr/sbin/alfred-json

The destination directory can be made directly available through apache:

$ cat /etc/apache2/site-enabled/000-default
...
        
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        
...

$ cat /etc/apache2/conf.d/freifunk
Alias /map /home/ffmap/www/
Alias /firmware /home/freifunk/autoupdates/

To execute, run ./mkmap.sh ../www The script expects above described sudo-wrappers in the $HOME directory of the user executing the script. If those are not available, an error will occurr if not executed as root. Also, the tool realpath optionally allows to execute the script from anywhere in the directory tree.

For the script's regular execution add the following to the crontab:

*/5 * * * * /home/ffmap/ffmap-backend/mkmap.sh /home/ffmap/www