powerup

powerup is a single serving web application to report power and network connection status to the web. I wrote it as hurricane Sandy approached on October 27, 2012 so, if I left the house, I would know whether I would be coming back to working lights and a cold refrigerator.

Please see power.ddbeck.com for a demonstration.

Usage

The application is an extremely simple Flask application (see requirements.txt for a complete list of Python dependencies). You will also need a settings module (e.g., settings.py) containing the application settings (see the Settings section below).

Please use your preferred WSGI deployment method. Once the application is running, configure a device to periodically POST to the application with the device's uptime and the secret token. This works best on an always-on device, like a router. Here's an example with cURL:

curl --data-urlencode "token=secrettoken" --data-urlencode "uptime=$(uptime)" http://example.com/update

Then you can check the status at the base URL.

Settings

The settings module may contain the following settings:

POWER_TIMEOUT

(Default: 30) The number of minutes without an update before the site reports a power outage.

SECRET_TOKEN

A string containing a secret that only you know about. It's used to discard unauthorized update attempts (though you may want to configure your webserver to refuse requests to the /update URL from unexepcted IP addresses as well).

STATUS_FILE

(Default: status.txt in the currrent working directory.) The path to the file in which the latest status is stored.

ACTIVE

(Default: True) Whether powerup should report its status. If set to False updates are still accepted, but the status page reports thtat the site is disabled.

Settings with a default value may be omitted from the settings module.

Copyright and License

Copyright 2015 Daniel D. Beck.

This is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the WTFPL, Version 2. See LICENSE.txt for details.