Urbit Access Proton Pinger

The purpose of the UrbitAccessProtonPinger is to notify an Urbit ship owner of the Landscape access code and base hash via a secure method.

hachul-havsum@urbit:~/urbit/git/UrbitAccessProtonPinger$ ./UrbitAccessProtonPinger.py --help
Usage: UrbitAccessProtonPinger.py [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --cache_file TEXT     Filename for cache storage  [required]
  --email TEXT          Email address to send/recv  [required]
  --password TEXT       Proton SMTP Bridge Password (omit to prompt)
  --urbit_port INTEGER  Urbit loopback port (defaults to 12321)
  --smtp_port INTEGER   Proton SMTP Bridge port (defaults to 1025)
  --help                Show this message and exit.

The pinger runs as a cron job and periodically queries the urbit dojo via the loopback mechanism to obtain the current value of the urbit information (access code and base hash). By use of a local hashed caching mechanism, only when the values have changed will the user be notified of the new values.

The notification method is to send an encrypted email using a single protonmail.com email address as the sender and receiver.

Note: this solution requires the ProtonMail Bridge Software installed on the same node as the Urbit ship and this Pinger utility.

To use the pinger, follow these steps:

1. Clone this repo on your Urbit ship node
2. If you don't already have one, create a Protonmail.com email account. Install its apps on the mobile devices you plan on receiving urbit pinger alerts
3. Install the email bridge from https://protonmail.com/bridge/install
4. Run the ProtonMail bridge and add your ProtonMail account to it. Leave it running
5. Add the pinger as a cron job. The following is a quick example of one way to accomplish this:
   1. From a terminal window, use the command crontab -e. Note you don't have to be superuser to edit the crontab file for your userid.
   2. Add a job line for the pinger such as this one, that checks every 10 minutes for a change in status:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /home/user/urbit/git/UrbitAccessProtonPinger/UrbitAccessProtonPinger.py \ --cache_file ~/.urbit_pinger --email addr@protonmail.com --password bridge_smtp_pw

Remember: the password and smtp_port arguments are the password and port from the ProtonMail SMTP Bridge utility.