Connect to wifi from command line on linux systems through the iwd (wireless daemon for linux)

Question

The iwd is the up-and-coming wireless daemon for linux released by Intel and the wpasupplicant successor. The development of iwd is still in progress, but it is packaged under some linux distribution Gentoo, Arch-linux , Ubuntu (Cosmic) and Debian (Buster and Sid)...

The configuration of the network and the connection is possible through the interactive mode using iwctl , the help command will display the list of the available commands (no manpage ).

Without using the interactive mode :

1. How can I manually configure the wifi credentials?
2. How can I connect to the configured wifi through iwctl?
3. How can I automatically enable the wifi connection at boot?

Answer 1

1) From the non-interactive mode , you can scan and list the available access points :

iwctl station wlp8s0 scan
iwctl station wlp8s0 get-networks

The wifi credentials are stored under /var/lib/iwd , the exact name of the SSID should be used , the format:

SSID.psk 

The content:

[Security]
PreSharedKey=encripted-password
Passphrase=the-plain-txt-password

The minimal configuration file should contain the encrypted wifi paswword (PreSharedKey)

To generate an encrypted psk , you can use the wpa_passhrase tool:

wpa_passhrase "My-SSID" passphrase

There is an example using "My SSID" and mysecretpassword:

$ cat My\ SSID.psk
[Security]
PreSharedKey=8e1e64a6ecaf2b5e0aa29816547af300d7f3b0473bbfa56ddb5514ad4683804c

2) To connect from the terminal:

iwctl station <INTERFACE> connect "SSID" 

e,g:

iwctl station wlp8s0 connect "My SSID"
dhclient

dhclient can be replaced an iproute2 command to assign an IP address to wlp8s0.

3) to automatically enable the wifi connection at boot , there is a way using a systemd service:

A minimal script to connect:

$ cat /usr/local/enable-wifi.sh

#!/bin/bash
iwctl station wlan0 connect "My SSID" 
dhclient

Create a systemd service.

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/enable-wifi.service

[Unit]
Before=network.target
Wants=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/enable-wifi.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

then :

# chmod 744 /usr/local/enable-wifi.sh
# chmod 664 /etc/systemd/system/enable-wifi.service
# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl enable enable-wifi.service

documentation:

arch-linux wiki : iwd

Debian wiki: NetworkManager/iwd

lwn: iwd: simplifying WiFi management