Tag Archives: whatsapp

Whatsapp to command your Raspberry Pi and Nagios monitoring

Do you want to command your Raspberry Pi via Whatsapp and have this system monitored and brought up by Nagios in case it dies?

Follow this guide! 🙂

Requirements:

  • Spare SIM card (number will be used by your Raspberry Pi)
  • A phone to keep the SIM card on during the registration process only
  • A Raspberry Pi (Debian 8 recommended)
  • Nagios

Let’s do it!

Step 1: Put your SIM in the phone and make sure the SIM can receive text messages (no data is required)

Step 2: Install/configure your Raspberry Pi

 

Installation

Yuwsup

To make all this magic happening, we’re going to use Yowsup

Here some easy steps to install on Raspian: (you can use also pip install yowsup2):

Once installed, you need to register your phone number, extract the password and use it to configure the following scripts.

To register, create a file called mydetails and add the following (replace country code and phone number accordingly):

After that, run this:

You should receive a text on your phone with a 6 digits code (xxx-xxx format). Use the following command to get the password:

After a little while, you should see some output like this:

Grab the pw bit and add append to your mydetails file:

Now you can test using the below bash script (demo.sh):

All should (hopefully) work! 🙂

Python scripts for yowsup

The following scripts and configurations are based on the following:

  • the user “piuser” is the one who will run the main scripts
  • scripts are stored into /home/piuser/WhatsappOnPi/scripts
  • the user “nagios” will need some extra privileges to run some scripts

 

In /home/piuser/WhatsappOnPi/scripts create the following scripts:

1) whatsapp.py

This script is the one that keeps layer.py script up and running.

2) layer.py

This script is the main one that you need to customise as you’d like:

3) mysettings.py

This is included in both scripts and it needs to be updated accordingly:

 

Now let’s create a wrapper to start the script:  /usr/local/bin/whatsapp_start

 

And now let’s append this into /etc/rc.local:

Done!
Every time we reboot the server, the script will start!

 

But… what happens if the script dies or something goes wrong?

Answer: Nagios!

Create custom plugin script for Nagios and save it in /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_whatsapp

NOTE: Make sure to follow the notes in this script to proper setup visudo

 

Now let’s enable this script in /etc/nagios/nrpe_local.cfg:

 

On the Nagios SERVER, let’s add the new service.
Following my current setup mentioned here, I’m going to add the following in /etc/nagios3/conf.d/hostgroups_services.cfg

When the service is configured, we need to append this service on the host where we want the check to be executed and verified (config in /etc/nagios3/conf.d/hosts.cfg – eg:)

 

A couple of restarts/reloads (nagios client and nagios server), and the check should be now visible in the web interface! 🙂


NOTE: You might see Waiting for this message. This may take a while.” on your Whatsapp while trying to talk with your Pi. And you can wait as much as you like, but it won’t get fixed by itself.

So… how make things working again?
What I’ve done to fix it is:

  • stopping nagios3 (setup to try to restart Whatsapp script if down)
  • kill the whatsapp python script running
  • use the above demo.sh script to send/receive some manual messages
  • if you can chat (send/receive correctly), you can now stop demo.sh script and start again your whatsapp python script

This always fixed this issue for me 🙂


Apologies for the typos and mistakes. This has been published more as a note for me than a proper how-to

Source: http://www.techradar.com/how-to/computing/how-to-control-a-raspberry-pi-using-whatsapp-1315610/2

Many thanks to Paul for the initial python scripts templates 🙂