My ESP8266 initialise sequence

For my personal records, and the worldwide community, here is how I initialised my two identical ESP8266 modules bought in September 2014. As usual with these almost undocumented electronics, YMMV: your module may vary.

All commands are terminated with CR and LF and not echoed locally (this is a setting of your terminal).

The module comes in AP mode: it acts as an access point. I wanted to use it as a normal device on my home network, so I changed it to "sta":

AT+CWMODE=1

This setting requires a cold restart of ESP8266. I am not sure a soft reset AT+RST is enough.

Now it is possible to join the local WiFi network:

AT+CWJAP="yourWiFinetworkid","yourWiFipassword"

To check if it has joined the network issue:

AT+CWJAP?

It will return the string +CWJAP:"yourWiFinetworkid"

Assuming your hotspot has a DHCP server, the assigned IP address is shown with:

AT+CIFSR

That's it, the device is connected. It will reconnect at each power cycle. As is it will not do anything useful, just reply to IP ping.

Again, YMMV.
(in other words: I am not able to offer support of any kind)