README

This is a rather simple Rails app that listens to MQTT messages and stores them in a database. It's designed to work with the zigbee2mqtt project, but could be used with any MQTT messages.

There's three reasons you might want to use this:

1. As a sanity check to make sure that your Zigbee network is working whilst you're setting it up and maybe having issues with the connection to Home Assistant.
2. To see in detail what's going on on your Zigbee network.
3. Once you've got everything working, you can use something like Uptime Kuma to check the devices are communicating as expected.

Although you could run this for a long period, this is more intended as a debugging tool to be run for shorter periods and then just throwing away the container and data.

If you want it to run longer you might want to use Postgres as the database.

No authentication!

This is intended to run on a private network, so there's no authentication. If you expose this to the internet, you'll want to add some authentication.

Running the Application

Pre-requisites

To run this, you'll need to have a MQTT broker running.

You'll also need to have Zigbee2MQTT running and sending messages to your MQTT broker.

Docker

The easiest way to get this running is to use Docker.

The one environment variable you have to set is MQTT_BROKER. This should be the URL connection string for your MQTT broker, which has the domain name/IP address, username, and password in (plus the ssl or not).

To launch a Docker container with the MQTT_BROKER environment variable, you can use the following command:

docker run -e MQTT_BROKER=<your_mqtt_broker_url> ghcr.io/simoncoles/zigbee2mqtt-capture:main

Replace <your_mqtt_broker_url> with the URL connection string for your MQTT broker. Make sure to specify the appropriate image name for your Rails app.

This is what works for me with my Zigbee2MQTT setup:

docker run -e MQTT_BROKER="mqtt://mqtt-test:[email protected]:1883" ghcr.io/simoncoles/zigbee2mqtt-capture:main

Docker Compose

As an alternative to running this on the Docker command line, you can also use the Docker Compose file in this repo. Copy the docker-compose.yml file to your desired location and edit the environment variables as needed.

Configuration

There isn't much and it is all done with environment variables.

• DATABASE_URL is your database connection string. It can be a Postgres or MySQL database, or if you specify nothing, it'll use SQLite.
• ZIGBEE2MQTT_BASE is your Zigbee2MQTT base URL which will be used to generate links to the Zigbee2MQTT web interface.
• APPSIGNAL_PUSH_API_KEY if you want to use AppSignal, this is your AppSignal API key.
• FORCE_THREADS=YES if you want to force the background threads to run. This is useful if want to force the threads to launch at startup in development. Otherwise, ignore this.
• MQTT_URL is your MQTT broker URL.
• PRUNE_HOURS is how many hours old messages should be pruned. 9000 is a year. Default is 48 hours.

Upgrades

If you want to preserve your data over upgrades, you'll need to do one of:

• Use Docker Compose and put your data in a volume
• Use Postgres or MySQL as the database

TODO When the server runs it'll create or migrate the database.

Limitations

This is using the free version of Avo which doesn't allow the controls to be customised, so you're able to create, edit, and delete items in the database. That doesn't make much sense, and ideally that would be prevented.

AppSignal

If you want to keep an eye on errors, you can use AppSignal. Set the environment variable APPSIGNAL_PUSH_API_KEY to your AppSignal API key.

Development

There's a Dev Container setup for use with Github Codespaces or VS Code, Cursor etc.

I have a .env file in my repository with the following:

MQTT_URL="mqtt://mqtt-user:[email protected]:1883"
ZIGBEE2MQTT_BASE="http://192.1.1.1:8080"

To run the web app in the dev container, you can run rails server.

To run the MQTT listener, you can run rails runner MqttMessage.listen.