Sports Home Automation with Swift Cloud

Backend serverless IaC on AWS to remotely control my Philips Hue bulbs whenever my favorite sports teams score or win. Written in Swift and deployed via Swift Cloud.

Read the blog post about it here.

Infrastructure

All infrastructure is defined in Sources/Infra/Project.swift and deployed to AWS.

Core pipeline (polls sports scores every 10 seconds):

1. EventBridge Cron - triggers the scheduler Lambda every minute
2. Scheduler Lambda - sends 6 SQS messages with staggered 10-second delays
3. SQS Queue - holds the polling trigger messages
4. Poller Lambda - triggered by SQS, polls the ncaa-api for Tulsa football/basketball scores and the public-espn-api for Eagles scores, writes results to DynamoDB
5. DynamoDB Table - stores current game state with streaming enabled (new + old images)
6. ScoreProcessor Lambda - triggered by DynamoDB Streams, detects scoring events and wins, then flashes Philips Hue lights in the appropriate team colors

Hue token refresh (keeps API tokens valid):

1. EventBridge Cron - triggers the token refresher every 3 days
2. HueTokenRefresher Lambda - refreshes Hue OAuth tokens stored in SSM Parameter Store

Deployment

Prerequisites

This project deploys without Docker using the Swift Static Linux SDK for cross-compilation from macOS to Linux.

1. Install Swiftly (Swift toolchain manager)

The Static Linux SDK requires the open-source Swift toolchain from swift.org, not the one bundled with Xcode. Swiftly manages this:

curl -O https://download.swift.org/swiftly/darwin/swiftly.pkg && \
installer -pkg swiftly.pkg -target CurrentUserHomeDirectory && \
~/.swiftly/bin/swiftly init --quiet-shell-followup && \
. "${SWIFTLY_HOME_DIR:-$HOME/.swiftly}/env.sh" && \
hash -r

Then install the matching Swift version:

swiftly install 6.3

Important: The Swiftly-managed toolchain is only used in the terminal for deployments. Xcode continues using its own bundled toolchain for iOS/macOS development - they don't interfere with each other.

2. Install the Static Linux SDK

The SDK version must match your Swift toolchain version exactly. Install from the Swift SDK bundles page:

swift sdk install <url-to-matching-static-linux-sdk>

Verify both match:

swift --version    # should show swift.org build, NOT "Apple Swift version"
swift sdk list     # should show the matching SDK version

3. AWS credentials

Ensure your AWS credentials are configured (e.g. via ~/.aws/credentials or environment variables).

Commands

Command	Description
swift run Infra deploy --stage prod	Deploy all infrastructure
swift run Infra remove --stage prod	Remove all infrastructure
swift run Infra preview --stage prod	Preview changes before deploying
swift run Infra outputs --stage prod	View stack outputs
swift run Infra cancel --stage prod	Cancel an in-progress operation

Deployment notes

• No Docker required. All Lambda functions use build: .staticLinuxSDK in Project.swift, which cross-compiles natively on macOS using the Static Linux SDK and deploys as zip packages.
• Binary stripping. Lambda executable targets have --strip-all linker flags (Linux-only, via Package.swift) to keep zip packages under the 70MB Lambda deployment limit.
• Package type must be .zip (the default). Using .image would require Docker to build container images. If binaries ever exceed the zip limit even after stripping, .image is the fallback but requires Docker.

AWS SDK

This project uses Soto (v7+) instead of the official AWS SDK for Swift. The official SDK depends on aws-crt-swift, which contains C code with Apple-specific headers (TargetConditionals.h) that break cross-compilation with the Static Linux SDK. Soto is a pure Swift implementation that cross-compiles cleanly.

Services used:

• SotoSQS - Scheduler sends delayed messages to the poller queue
• SotoDynamoDB - Poller writes game state to the Scores table
• SotoSSM - ScoreProcessor and HueTokenRefresher read/write Hue API tokens in Parameter Store