pfsensecontrol

pfSense "API" emulator for C#

Since pfSense itself does not have a programmatic API, this is essentially a high-level API created for controlling pfSense appliance.

The "API" presented here is mostly a crude browser emulator in that HttpClient along with Html Agility Pack are used to perform necessary calls to pfSense web UI and scrape off the necessary data to make it useful in an OOP context.

WARNING: experimental stuff

This project started because one day my primary WAN access died and my LTE backup was cumbersome to reconfigure to keep internet connectivity. I then wanted a sort of simple "toggle switch" that can be used to quickly failover to LTE backup interface in case the primary cable modem WAN goes bad again.

There's a couple of things I wanted to determine in this scenario:

1. Determine the "quality" of WAN connection first if failover makes sense (excessive packet loss over last 5 minutes)

2. Change default gateway to LTE instead of WAN

3. Reset whole-house VPN connection (ProtonVPN)

4. Reset states table to re-establish connectivity

5. Enable certain firewall rules to reduce traffic via LTE to conserve bandwidth and costs (LTE is expensive!)

... and vise-versa in case WAN comes back up, I want a simple "manual transfer switch" that can do all this work.

What's implemented

So, here's the status of it today.

There's the main PfSenseContext which can be used to Login to the appliance. This class then has methods that mimick the Web GUI (e.g. GetSystemGateways() == System > Gateways in UI).

Under the hood, HttpClient is used to make HTTP calls, with HtmlDocument to parse the result and make it useful in OOP-way or for further scripting.

** Tested & developed with pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p3 as of February 12, 2020 **

Example

using (var context = new PfSenseContext("https://pfsensebox/", new System.Net.NetworkCredential("usernamehere", "passwordhere")))
{
	context.Login().GetAwaiter().GetResult(); // or use await if method is async
	var gateways = context.GetSystemGateways().GetAwaiter().GetResult();
	
	// gateways mirrors the information presented on System > Routing > Gateways page at https://pfsensebox/system_gateways.php
}