Fetching WiFi Configs on Raspberry Pi

Photo by Harrison Broadbent on Unsplash

In this short post, we will learn how to fetch a list of configured Wifi networks on your Raspberry Pi.

If you are looking to configure Wifi on the Raspberry Pi then refer to this post.

Python Script to Configure WiFi On Raspberry Pi Without Reboot

The Wifi config on a Raspberry Pi is stored in the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

The wpa_supplicant.conf file contents should look something like this:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=US
network={
     ssid="<YOUR_WIFI_NAME>"
     psk="<YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD>"
}
network={
     ssid="<YOUR_WIFI_NAME_2>"
     psk="<YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD_2>"
}

Let us get started and learn how to work with the wifi configs.

Step 1: Install wpasupplicantconf

Install the wpasupplicantconf lib for parsing the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

pip install wpasupplicantconf

Step 2: Read the config file

Next, read the plain text file contents from the wpa_supplicant.conf

def get_wifi_config():
    file = open('/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf', 'r')
    lines = file.readlines()
    return lines

Step 3: Get Configured Networks

Finally, we can get a list of configured networks as follows

from wpasupplicantconf import WpaSupplicantConf, ParseError
def get_wifi_networks():
    try:
        lines = get_wifi_config()
        wpa_conf = WpaSupplicantConf(lines)
        network_keys = list(wpa_conf.networks().keys())
        if len(network_keys) == 0:
            print('no wifi network configured')
            return None
        else:
            networks = wpa_conf.networks()
            return networks

That’s it. It will return you an OrderedDict of networks as follows.

OrderedDict([
    ('Wifi1', OrderedDict([('psk', '"Password1"')])),
    ('Wifi2', OrderedDict([('psk', '"Password1"')]))
])

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