harmony-http

Shortcuts for Logitech Harmony without cloud dependencies

About

Logitech’s app for the Harmony Hub does not support Shortcuts on iOS. Some people work around this by leveraging IFTTT Webhooks. I wanted to control devices attached to my Harmony Hub using Shortcuts, but I did not want to rely on the cloud.

So I built harmony-http. It’s a tiny Express app with three endpoints:

• GET /volumeup
• GET /volumedown
• GET /mute

It is designed to run on an always-on server (e.g. a Raspberry Pi) on your local network.

Configuration

The following environment variables are required. They will be loaded from a .env file if one is present:

• IP_ADDRESS is the IP address of your Harmony Hub
• REMOTE_ID is the unique identifier of your Harmony Hub, and can be obtained by running node_modules/.bin/harmonyhub-remote-id $IP_ADDRESS
• DEVICE_ID is the unique identifier of the Harmony Hub-connected device you want to control using Shortcuts
• PORT is the port for the harmony-http server

Running as a systemd service

1. Clone this repository to /var/lib/harmony-http:

sudo mkdir /var/lib/harmony-http
sudo chown -R `whoami` /var/lib/harmony-http
git clone https://github.com/smockle/harmony-http /var/lib/harmony-http

2. Install dependencies: npm --prefix /var/lib/harmony-http install /var/lib/harmony-http

3. Create a .env file in /var/lib/harmony-http with variables described in Configuration:

tee /var/lib/harmony-http/.env << EOF
IP_ADDRESS=
REMOTE_ID=
DEVICE_ID=
PORT=
EOF

4. Create a system user: sudo useradd --system harmony-http

5. Create a systemd service:

sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/harmony-http.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Harmony HTTP
Wants=network-online.target
After=syslog.target network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=harmony-http
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/harmony-http
ExecStart=/var/lib/harmony-http/index.js
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
KillMode=process

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

6. Enable the harmony-http system user to access files in /var/lib/harmony-http: sudo chown -R harmony-http:harmony-http /var/lib/harmony-http

7. Enable the systemd service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable harmony-http
sudo systemctl start harmony-http

Creating Shortcuts

1. Add a “URL” step:

• URL: http://IP_ADDRESS:PORT/(volumeup|volumedown|mute)

2. Add a “Get Contents of URL” step:

• Method: GET