jspaulsen / home-monitoring-stack

Home monitoring and automation stack

home-monitoring-stack

Home Monitoring and Automation

Home Monitoring and Automation is an ansible provisioned, docker-compose run stack of images for monitoring and automation.

Monitoring and Visualization

• House Monitor Sub is used to subscribe to an MQTT with Tasmota sensor devices and publish them to Timescale.
• Grafana is used to visualize data within Timescale

Automation

• Node Red is used for automation, typically via MQTT

Required Tools

• terraform

Deployment Targets

This has been run and tested against on a Raspberry Pi 4B running Ubuntu Server 22.04. In theory, this should run against any target with comparable specs and configuration. If run against a "cloud" target, it might be worth refactoring to make setup.sh run as part of cloud-init.

Configuration and Deployment

This stack is designed to run locally but with some changes can likely be made to run a remote, cloud based solution (e.g., AWS EC2 or DigitalOcean droplet).

Preqrequisite

home-monitoring-stack is designed to be deployed by terraform and remotely run ansible to provision the machine. All configuration files are copied over via a ssh terraform provider. As such, if running locally, it is necessary to do minor configuration ahead of time.

These prerequisite steps must be performed before attempting deployment

Machine Hostname and User

• Set hostname and user of machine being provisioned in main.tf locals block
  • local_hostname
  • local_user

Local Machine Configuration

• Generate a new ssh key for use with terraform and install on the remote machine. See ssh-copy-id for more information.

  • It is imperative you keep the remote key for now; this is used for all future deployment

• Configure the user for passwordless sudo. See this for more information

Terraform Configuration

It is necessary to change the terraform backend (in backend.tf) to reflect your terraform backend; home-monitoring-stack by default uses Terraform Cloud but any backend should work.

Terraform Cloud

Login via terraform login and follow the directions prior to initial deployment.

Terraform Variables

The following terraform variables are required for deployment:

• local_private_key - This must be the contents of the private key generated in the earlier prerequisite configuration. This can be stored in an environment variable.

• postgres_password - Postgres password used by Timescale database.

It is recommended these values be stored in a .env file to be sourced and provided by environment variables prior to deployment. This can be done by prefixing TF_VAR_ to the terraform.

Example:

export TF_VAR_local_private_key=""
export TF_VAR_postgres_password=""

Stack Configuration

Some aspects of the deployed configuration can be configured via the locals block in main.tf:

• ports
• directories (both for mounted volumes and for configuration directory)
• docker image versions

Deployment

Once the prerequisite configuration, terraform configuration configuration and terraform variables are available and any optional changes made to the stack configuration, terraform deploy can occur

terraform init
terraform deploy