Web Server Installation

This page contains instructions for installation of the web server. If you just want to run scripts from the command lline, please refer to the simpler instructions in Basic Installation.

The focus here is installation on a Raspberry Pi. However, the instructions should be fairly accurate for a typical Debian-based system.

A key goal for this project is to produce something that’s genuinely useful on an everyday basis. For me, that’s a local web server which is available 24/7. This means it should be cheap to buy and consume a small amount of power.

The Raspberry Pi Zero-W has been a good fit for my everyday use. Other Raspberry Pi models will work as well, but the Zero-W is among the cheapest, and is entirely capable enough for this purpose.

The server runs well on a stock installation of Raspbian. It also runs on Debian and MacOS; basically, you need a Python interpreter revision 3.5 or higher.

On a typical installation, two separate process will run:

  1. The web application server, a Python program that implements the UI and runs the scripts, plus

  2. The lighttpd process, which attaches to the Python app via FCGI and then services incoming HTTP requests for web pages.

O.S. Setup

This overview assumes you have already done the following, which are outside the scope of this document:

  1. Install Raspberry Pi OS on your device. For more information, please refer to the software installation instructions at https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/getting-started.html. If you’re going to run a headless server, any installation including the “Lite” one is sufficient.

  2. Enable WiFi and ssh on your device. The server will run without a monitor or keyboard attached. For more information, see the Raspberry Pi remote access documentation.

If your device has a physical ethernet port, you can use a wired connection instead of WiFi, but it needs to be on the same network that the lights are on.

By default, RPi OS already has a Python interpreter, so you won’t need to install it. However, if you desire more information on running Python code, please refer to the Raspberry Pi Python documentation.

Dedicated User

A special-purpose user is convenient for running the server. It provides you with a home directory for the Bardolph code, and allows you to tailor that user’s characteristics to running the server. Therefore, the next step is to create a user called lights.

sudo adduser lights

Note that this user doesn’t have any special privileges. This ensures that the Python code itself runs under a standard account, thus improving security.

I also change the name of the server. In this example, my server will be “vanya”, accessed on the command line and in my browser as “vanya.local”. This can be done with raspi-config.

Download Source Tree

The web server relies on many non-Python files that are not part of the packaged distribution. As a result, you’ll need to clone the entire source tree. First, log in as the lights user, then:

git clone https://github.com/al-fontes-jr/bardolph

Install Python Modules

Still logged in as the lights user:

pip install bardolph

Note

Python 3.7 or higher is required in all cases. If your system defaults to Python 2.x, you probably need to use pip3 instead of pip throughout these instructions. Notable culprits here are Raspbery Pi OS and Debian. You may even have to install pip3 itself with sudo apt-get install python3-pip.

After this intallation, the lsc, lsrun, and lscap commands will be placed into your ~/.local/bin directory, which you should add to your path.

This installation also publishes Python modules for parsing and executing scripts.

As of this writing, the default .profile on in Raspbian adds ~/.local/bin to your path, but only if the directory exists when you log in. Therefore, either log out and back in again, or:

source ~/.profile

If you are using a different operating system, or your .profile doesn’t add the path, you’ll need to do so yourself.

Testing the Installation

To do a quick sanity check:

lsrun -h

This should display a help screen. To make sure Bardolph is able to access your lights:

lscap

For all the bulbs that are discovered, you will see a plain-text table of their current settings.

HTTP Server Setup

This is the first of several steps that need to be done while logged in as a user with sudo access, such as the default pi user.

Because the Bardolph server runs as a WSGI application, multiple options exist for using a front-end to implement the HTTP protocol. I’ve settled on lighttpd, which ships with a module for FastCGI.

Installation of lighttpd is outside the scope of this document. I recommend visting the lighttpd website for more information. However, the basic installation can be done with

sudo apt-get install lighttpd

This also installs spawn-fcgi.

To use the lighttpd configuration supplied in the Bardolph source distribution, you need create symbolic links to the root of the project, or copy the configuration files to /etc/lighttpd. I prefer symbolic links, because the configuration files get updated automatically whenever you refresh the source code from github.com.

For example, if you downloaded the code from github to ~lights/bardolph:

cd /etc/lighttpd
sudo mv lighttpd.conf lighttpd.conf.original
sudo ln -s /home/lights/bardolph/web/server/rpi/lighttpd.conf .
sudo ln -s /home/lights/bardolph/web/server/common.conf .

Log Directory Setup

This is another step you take as a user with sudo access, such as the pi default user.

The web site configuration files in the source tree specify that all of the logs reside in the directory /var/log/lights. Therefore, as part of your setup, you need to do the following:

sudo mkdir /var/log/lights
sudo chown lights:lights /var/log/lights

This allows processes owned by the lights meta-user to write all of the logs in one place.

Restart HTTP Server With New Configuration

By default, the lighttpd daemon will already be running. You need to restart it to enable the new configuration with:

sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Application Server

From this step forward, you should be logged in as user lights.

The HTTP server communicates with the outside world via HTTP on port 80, but all of the program logic and UI implemtation is in a web app, contained in a Python module.

That web app runs within Flask. It also uses flup for its WSGI implementation. The core Bardolph code relies on lifxlan. You can install all these with:

pip install Flask flup lifxlan

Because the Bardolph package lists lifxlan as a dependency, it may have already been installed, in which case pip won’t attempt to re-download it.

Start the Application Server

From the source distribution directory, for example ~/bardolph:

./start_fcgi

You should do this as the lights user.

If all goes well, you should be able to access the home page. Because I’ve named my server “vanya” with raspi-config, I access it at http://vanya.local.

For more information on using the web server, please see Web Frontend Server.

After a Reboot

Whenever you reboot the computer, you will need to start the FCGI process again. To do so, ssh to the server as user lights and:

cd bardolph
./start_fcgi

If you are clever enough with Linux, you can probably set up an init script to do this. I’m investigatng this and will update these docs when it’s ready.

By default, lighttpd is launched when the system boots, so you should not need to manually start that process.

Stopping

To stop (and, if you want, start) the HTTP server:

sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd stop
sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd start

I don’t have an elegant way to stop the FCGI process, so, as the lights user:

killall python3

or

killall python

Uninstalling

Uninstall with:

pip uninstall bardolph

Aside from that un-install, you can also recursively delete the source tree.