Onboard a MikroTik router in three minutes, with two commands

13 July 2026

Setting up a MikroTik router for ISP service usually means an afternoon in Winbox: bridge, address, DHCP, PPPoE server, NAT, firewall, and then whatever remote-access arrangement you'll regret later. ConnectR compresses that into two commands pasted into the router's terminal.

The two commands

Create the site in your dashboard, open a terminal on the router (Winbox → New Terminal), and paste:

/tool fetch url="https://api.connectrisp.com/api/setup/<site>/<tenant>/master" dst-path=connectr-master.rsc
/import connectr-master.rsc

The first command downloads a small orchestration script. The second runs it.

What actually happens

The master script checks your RouterOS version and internet connectivity, then downloads one bundle containing all eight configuration components and applies them in order:

1. Cleanup — removes any previous ConnectR configuration so re-runs are safe
2. Bridge — aggregates LAN ports (existing bridges are detected and left alone)
3. IP configuration — gateway address on the bridge
4. DHCP — pool, network, and server for customer devices
5. PPPoE — the server your billed customers authenticate against
6. Firewall — established/related, LAN accept, NAT, drop the rest
7. WireGuard — a management tunnel to the ConnectR server, with keys provisioned before the router ever came online
8. Services — enables the API for management, disables telnet and FTP

The whole bundle is about 10 KB and applies in well under a minute on a 600 MHz board.

The part you don't do

The interesting engineering is in what's absent: you never touch the server side. When you created the site, ConnectR reserved a WireGuard key pair and tunnel address from a pre-generated pool. A sync agent on the server registers the peer within ten seconds — so by the time your router finishes importing its config, the other end of the tunnel is already listening. The dashboard's connection check polls every eight seconds and flips to green on the first handshake.

From there everything is remote: customer sync, monitoring, port management, and the nightly configuration backup all ride the tunnel.

If something goes wrong

The script detects conflicts rather than steamrolling them — an existing bridge means ConnectR creates its own with a different name; a 192.168.88.x network in use shifts ConnectR to 192.168.89.x. And because cleanup runs first, the honest fix for most problems is simply pasting the two commands again.