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We have a raspberry pi (with raspbian OS) that runs some application, this application uses a local configuration file that contains some data like username, password, server url etc. We will provide raspberry pis (with the software installed) to users, they will have to connect them to their local network. We want to provide a way for users to change the configuration file. The solution so far is to create a local configuration web page (similar to the ones routers usually have), so the users can access this web page from their LAN and change all necessary configuration data.

What will be good solutions to do that? So far I have an idea to run a local web server on the raspberry pi, that will run some front end web page with the UI, it will be communicating to a local back end application (NodeJS as an option) that in turn will be modifying a configuration file. Are there any caveats for this solution? Are there any better/easier solutions to achieve that? Also I would like to know how this is usually done on routers?

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    I feel this is an open-ended question, and you might have more luck getting a good answer if you did a little more research on your own before posting. In general, there are many ways to set up a web-based gui, and I'm reasonably certain that routers of different stripes use different approaches. In general, I think your choice would be driven by the programming language that you're most familiar with. Hope that helps.
    – Seamus
    Jul 26, 2018 at 19:03

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I think making a web page would be the best option for what you're trying to do. I think the main problem with this is how are your users going to know the IP address of the pi? Doing this with your router is easy because you know its IP.

Disregarding that issue (maybe you've figured that out) I would just run an Apache web server on the pi with one page that uses PHP to take the inputs and edit the configuration file. Even if you have never used Apache or PHP, what you're asking for is simple enough for a beginner to quickly figure out and Apache pretty much sets itself up.

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    Right, Apache is a very powerful web server for thousands of web pages and user connections. But isn't it a bit oversized for this one web page for one user used one times in a month?
    – Ingo
    Jul 28, 2018 at 0:36
  • I suppose you could argue that. If that's a concern there are other options (like lighttp) but I've used apache for simple things with only a couple of pages and have had no issues.
    – Will N
    Jul 30, 2018 at 20:24

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