PiGod

A monitoring and controlling tool for the Raspberry Pi built with node.js/express.

This is for my own entertainment, but any ideas/contributions are welcome.

Installation

Clone the git repo (for now).

git clone https://github.com/Sly1024/pigod.git

Requirements

• a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian - I have a Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian Wheezy (Linux raspi 4.1.13-v7+); but most of the modules should work on any linux machine (see modules)
• Node.js - tested with v4.2.1.

Dependencies

Install runtime dependencies

npm install - in the repo folder.

• node.js/express - web server
• basic-auth-connect - for basic security; planning to do proper HTTPS in the future
• riot.js - a data-binding micro library; compiling tag files on server and binding to UI on the client
• Bootstrap - for basic styling
• jQuery - because Bootstrap needs it, but I want to get rid of it
• smoothie charts - for displaying timeseries data graphs
• ws - websocket lib for node

At the moment the client-side libraries are served directly from the node_modules folder. I want to build them to a single js file in the future, but if I wait long enough, with HTTP/2.0 it might not be necessary.

Running the server from command line

node app.js

Some modules require root - do this at your own risk, don't blame me if it causes issues!

sudo node app.js

By default the express server runs at port 3000, so navigate to:

http://<your_pi's_IP>:3000/

Enter the username/password (default: pi/berry - you should change it in app.js), and if everything went OK, you should see the page.

Installing as a service

If you plan to do development, it is useful to have the app restarted automatically when you change any file.
For that I used foreverjs

npm install forever -g

And to automatically start forever as a service, you can use forever-service

npm install forever-service -g

I created a script that installs pigod as a service named 'pigodsvc': install-forever-service.sh
This watches the folder for file changes except the static folder which contains the client-side code.

Note: the service also runs as root!

Uninstalling the service:

forever-service delete pigodsvc

Background

See docs/background.

Architecture

See docs/architecture.

Modules

See docs/modules.

TODOs

This is not in priority order!

• Get rid of jQuery - it's too heavy, I only use a small portion; I like micro libraries more.
• Use the observable provided by riot.js as it is present on both server and client.
• Factor out a common panel tag and use it in all module tags.
• Retry connection on client if disconnected.
• wsPubSubClient and wsPubSubServer has a lot of common code - needs refactoring
• Add SOW (state of the world) and delta updates to wsPubSub - see issue #1
• Factor out HTML table generation (maybe?) and sorting functionality.
• Build (concatenate + minify) all client-side libs (and the compiled riot tags) into a single file.
• Add crosshair on mouseover to smoothie charts.
• Implement monitoring modules (CPU) with reading from /proc.
• Use HTTPS for better security.
• Add ability to manage individual modules on the client - start/stop stream(s), add/remove module.
• Persist UI layout.
• Documentation
• Tests?

Browser Support

The client libraries and the compiled Javascript code should be compatible with all EcmaScript 5 browsers, but I use some CSS3 features, like flexbox. I have tested it on Chrome and MS Edge.