Latest revision as of 17:30, 26 May 2020

Controlling the home from distance can be made via standard web access methods such as the RESTful API.

Different options are available for the implementation of such a service:

• Installing a web server and writing CGI scipts
• Writing scripts serving a TCP socket and complying to the HTTP scheme
• Using a framework such as:
  • HTTP::Server::Simple
  • Mojolicious

I have chosen Mojolicious Lite for its simplicity and the ease of development.

Before all, make sure you have installed an xPL hub together with the xPL state monitor.

Install Mojolicious Lite

Mojolicious::Lite can be installed with the standard CPAN method. For Debian and related distributions such as Ubuntu, a dedicated option is to use:

sudo apt install libmojolicious-perl

Test the REST server

Download the xPL home state REST interface script.

Start the server:

REST_PORT=13865
REST_SERVICE_DIRECTORY='/home/control/Documents/Controls'
morbo -l http://*:$REST_PORT $REST_SERVICE_DIRECTORY/xpl-homeStateRest.pl

This starts an HTTP service. Each time the Perl script is updated, the service is updated too. Interpretor errors are displayed in the terminal in whick the morbo runs.

Test the service in another terminal window:

REST_PORT=13865
curl -X GET localhost:$REST_PORT/state/study/lights/ceiling && echo
curl -X PUT localhost:$REST_PORT/state/study/lights/ceiling/on

Check the result in:

cat /tmp/xpl-homeStateRest.log

Install the REST server

Once the script works, stop it with ctrl-C. Launch it as a daemon:

$REST_SERVICE_DIRECTORY/xpl-homeStateRest.pl daemon -l http://*:$REST_PORT 2>/devull &

Stop the daemon:

pkill -f xpl-homeStateRest

Debian with SystemD

On Debian with systemd (such as Raspbian or Ubuntu), the scripts can be defined as services.

Edit /lib/systemd/system/xpl-homeStateRest.service:

[Unit]
Description=xPL home state REST interface
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=control
Group=users
ExecStart=/home/control/Documents/Controls/xpl-homeStateRest.pl daemon -m production -l http://*:13865
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Activate the service:

su
systemctl enable xpl-homeStateRest.service
service xpl-homeStateRest start

Reboot and check:

ps ax | grep -v grep | grep -i xpl
ps aux | grep -i xpl | grep -v grep | sed 's/.*\/Controls\///'
systemctl list-units --type=service --state=running | grep xpl
service xpl-homeStateRest status