2026-01-19 | [meshtastic]
Proponents of the Meshtastic hobbyist mesh network loudly tout the "decentralized" and "off-grid" nature of the project. This is strictly true; once your Meshtastic node is set up and the app is installed on your phone, you can communicate on the Meshtastic network in a completely off-grid fashion, with no need for internet or anything else apart from a power supply for your devices.
However, if you need to be able to maintain the network - perhaps change out a node or add a new one, or access the web client, or read the documentation, you'll probably have difficulty doing so without internet access. You might say, "Well, it's all on the github!" which is exactly what I was told when I asked about this, but there are 118 repositories on there and unless you're a developer on the project, it's not super obvious what you'll need before you lose internet access. Even at that, you could be blocked by a git clone, pip install or apt-get halfway through, and be SOL.
This isn't really Meshtastic's fault; it's just how modern open source projects go these days, but even so there doesn't seem to be a how to host this project offline section in the docs. Development and discussion takes place mainly on Github, Discord, Reddit, and Youtube. In a real emergency, you will not have access to these and will be merely alone with your accumulated knowledge, perhaps with others who will turn to you for answers.
Or, maybe you are simply somewhere without reliable internet access, and want to learn about and test out Meshtastic. This is how I first became aware of this problem.
Most Meshtastic tutorials cover how to take your hardware, flash the firmware, setup the client, and start talking on the network. This is not one of those guides; here, we'll be setting up your computer with all the prerequisites needed to be able to do those tasks without access to the internet. This author might assume you have some familiarity with networking, installing Linux, and working with ESP32s and electronics, but maybe not so much knowledge about modern web dev stacks, because that describes me pretty well.
I'm going to be targeting the Raspberry Pi 3B+ as our target computer of choice. If you're the kind of person who is going to be setting up this station
to be continued