wifi-connect default not working on Raspberry Pi 5

Product support
,
1

Hi,

I’m trying to use wifi-connect (GitHub - balena-io-experimental/wifi-connect: Easy WiFi setup for Linux devices from your mobile phone or laptop) and I feel like nobody else seems to use that. Is there something new out? Or how could it be that a simple setup is not working on Raspberry Pi 5 in 2025?
Looking at the repo it does not look abandoned, latest update July 2025. And Raspberry Pi 5 is not that new.

This is not working with the onboard Wifi:

services:
  wifi-connect:
    image: bh.cr/balenalabs/wifi-connect-rpi
    labels:
      io.balena.features.dbus: '1'
      io.balena.features.firmware: '1'
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    environment:
      DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS: 'unix:path=/host/run/dbus/system_bus_socket'
      PORTAL_SSID: "MyWay connect"
    network_mode: host

Is it really that I need to go by a wifi dongle? And turn off the internal Wifi?

It fails with:

 wifi-connect  Checking internet connectivity ...
 wifi-connect  Your device is already connected to the internet.
 wifi-connect  Starting up Wifi-Connect.\n Connect to the Access Point and configure the SSID and Passphrase for the network to connect to.
 wifi-connect  [network_manager::device:WARN] Undefined device type: 32
 wifi-connect  WiFi device: wlan0
 wifi-connect  [network_manager::dbus_api:ERROR] Get org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.AccessPoint::RsnFlags property failed on /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/AccessPoint/5: wrong property type
 wifi-connect  Error: Getting access points failed
 wifi-connect    caused by: D-Bus failure: Get org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.AccessPoint::RsnFlags property failed on /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/AccessPoint/5: wrong property type

BTW: It’s funny it says “already connected” but then goes on to spawn an AP anyway…

Any help very much appreciated. I’ll try to get my hands on one of the mentioned dongles and try to see if that helps.

Cheers

2

I tried to build wifi-connect from scratch on vanilla install of RaspianOS 64-Bit on a Raspberry Pi 5 in order to find out if it works with the built in WIFI adapter.

But got these errors when trying to build the project:

test@test:~/wifi-connect $ cargo build
warning: no edition set: defaulting to the 2015 edition while the latest is 2024
   Compiling rand_os v0.1.3
   Compiling traitobject v0.1.0
   Compiling unicode-normalization v0.1.24
   Compiling httparse v1.9.5
   Compiling mime v0.2.6
error[E0119]: conflicting implementations of trait `Trait` for type `(dyn Send + Sync + 'static)`
  --> /home/test/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/traitobject-0.1.0/src/impls.rs:72:1
   |
71 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Send + Sync { }
   | ------------------------------------------------ first implementation here
72 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Send + Send + Sync { }
   | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ conflicting implementation for `(dyn Send + Sync + 'static)`

error[E0119]: conflicting implementations of trait `Trait` for type `(dyn Send + Sync + 'static)`
  --> /home/test/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/traitobject-0.1.0/src/impls.rs:73:1
   |
71 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Send + Sync { }
   | ------------------------------------------------ first implementation here
72 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Send + Send + Sync { }
73 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Sync + Send { }
   | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ conflicting implementation for `(dyn Send + Sync + 'static)`

error[E0119]: conflicting implementations of trait `Trait` for type `(dyn Send + Sync + 'static)`
  --> /home/test/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/traitobject-0.1.0/src/impls.rs:75:1
   |
71 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Send + Sync { }
   | ------------------------------------------------ first implementation here
...
75 | unsafe impl Trait for ::std::marker::Sync + Send + Sync { }
   | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ conflicting implementation for `(dyn Send + Sync + 'static)`

For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0119`.
error: could not compile `traitobject` (lib) due to 3 previous errors
warning: build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...
3

I was able to use wifi-connect on a Pi 5 using this docker-compose entry:


  wifi-connect:
    image: bh.cr/balenalabs/wifi-connect-aarch64
    restart: always
    network_mode: host
    privileged: true
    labels:
      io.balena.features.dbus: "1"
      io.balena.features.firmware: "1"