In an attempt to utilize my web-connected security system with Home-Assistant (home-assistant.io), I did some research on it’s web interface, and it looks like it uses websockets to imitate keypad presses.
I would like Home-Assistant, which typically functions as a Websockets server itself to be able to monitor/control the security system by acting as the client(?), but it seems like all the documentation seems to show HA as the server and not as the client.
Thank You!
Have you looked at the HASS websocket documentation. You can send commands to services and also subscribe to the websocket server. This should give you the ability to talk to HASS by sending a service call to any of the registered components (such as zwave door sensors or siren). Does that make sense?
https://home-assistant.io/developers/websocket_api/
Related
I'm making a nodejs application that will act a server for other sites in different countries as the data being transmitted will be business related data. I would like to know how I can safely/securely send this data.
I am currently using socket.io to act as my main server (Master) on other sites there are (Slave) servers that handle the data from the master server.
I have got this working in a local environment but want to deploy this in the other sites.
I have tried to Google this to see if anyone else has done this but came across socket.io sessions but I don't know if this will fit with (Server->Server) connections.
Any help or experience would be grateful.
For server-server communication where you control both ends of the communication you can use WebSocket over HTTPS, you can use TCP over SSH tunnel or any other encrypted tunnel. You can use a PubSub service, a queue service etc. There are a lot of ways you can do it. Just make sure that the communication is encrypted either natively by the protocols you use or with VPN or tunnels that connect your servers in remote locations.
Socket.io is usually used as a replacement for WebSocket where there is no native support in the browser. It is rarely used for server to server communication. See this answer for more details:
Differences between socket.io and websockets
If you want a higher level framework with focus on real-time data then see ActionHero:
https://www.actionherojs.com/
For other options of sending real-time data between servers you can use some shared resource like a Redis database or some pub/sub service like Faye or Kafka, or a queue service like ZeroMQ or RabbitMQ. This is what is usually done to make things like that work across multiple instances of the server or multiple locations. You could also use a CouchDB changes feed, or a similar feature of RethinkDB to make sure that all of your instances get all the data as soon as it is posted by any one of them. See:
http://docs.couchdb.org/en/2.0.0/api/database/changes.html
https://rethinkdb.com/docs/changefeeds/javascript/
https://redis.io/topics/pubsub
https://faye.jcoglan.com/
https://kafka.apache.org/
Everything that uses HTTP is easy to encrypt with HTTPS. Everything else can be encrypted with a tunnel or VPN.
Good tools that can add encryption for protocols that are not encrypted themselves (like e.g. the Redis protocol) are:
http://www.tarsnap.com/spiped.html
https://www.stunnel.org/index.html
https://openvpn.net/
https://forwardhq.com/help/ssh-tunneling-how-to
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol
Note that some hosting services may give you preconfigured tunnels or internal network interfaces that pass data encrypted between your servers located in different data centers of that provider. Some providers give you tools and tutorials to that easily as well.
I have a program in an embedded device that outputs an xml string to a socket. The embedded device has lighthttpd has a web server. I want to use a web based client (no flash/silverlight) to connect to the socket and pull the xml data every second.
I looked at Node.js with Socket.io to get what I want to do, but I am not clear about how to proceed. Searching through the Node.js and Socket.io documentation and examples I see standard client-server behavior, nothing regarding what I am trying to do.
Basically, the web server is just there to accept a connection from a client on the socket that the embedded application is outputting data to. Basically the web server's purpose is to just let the client retrieve data from the raw tcp socket that the embedded application is writing to. Please advice.
I solved the problem using Websockify, which acts as bridge between a TCP Socket and a browser.
The html client will connect to a websocket, and Websockify will listen on the websocket port and transmit data between the websocket and the tcp socket.
Web browsers have the ability to do HTTP requests (which can be web page requests or Ajax requests for data) and webSocket connections. You will need to pick one of these two mechanisms if you're sticking with stock browser access.
If the lighthttpd web server in the embedded device does not support webSockets, then your choice will like be an Ajax call from the browser to your server. This is basically just an HTTP request that make return something different than a web page (often JSON data) and is designed to fetch data from the server into a web client.
If the lighthttpd web server does support webSockets, then you could use a webSocket connection to fetch the data too. This has an advantage of being a persistent connection and allows for the server to directly send data to the client (without the client even requesting more data) whenever it wants to (more efficient for constant updates).
An Ajax connection is generally not persistent. A client sends an Ajax request, the server returns the answer and the connection is closed. The next request starts a new Ajax request.
Either Ajax requests or webSocket connections should work just fine for your use. All browsers still in use support Ajax. WebSockets are supported in modern browsers (IE10 and higher).
Once you decide upon a client connection strategy, then you'd build your web app on the embedded device that served as the middleman between the browser and the data on the embedded device. It would collect the appropriate data from the embedded device and then be able to send that to browser clients that connected and requested the data.
I'm not sure exactly why you mentioned node.js. In this circumstance, it would be used as the web server and the environment for building your app and the logic that collects the data from your device and feeds it to the requesting web browser, but it sounds like you already have lighthttpd for this purpose. Personally, I recommend node.js if it works in your environment. Combined with socket.io (for webSocket support), it's a very nice way to connect browsers directly to an embedded device. I have an attic fan controller written in node.js and running on a Raspberry Pi. The node.js app monitors temperature probes and controls relays that switch attic fans and node.js also serves as a web server for me to administer and monitor the node.js. All-in-all, it's a pretty slick environment if you already know and like programming in Javascript and there's a rich set of add-in modules to extend its capabilities available through NPM. If, however, your embedded device isn't a common device that there is already support for node.js on or it doesn't already have node.js on it, then you'd be facing a porting tasks to make node.js run on it which might be more work than using some other development environment that already runs on the device like lighthttpd.
I have a web application that requires PUSH notifications. I looked into node.js and socket.io and have an example that's working. The question I have is, Is it possible to use socket.io only in my client side JS without running a node.js server?
Can a third party server just send requests to a proxy server and may be socket.io just listens to a port on the proxy server and sends back events to it?
Thanks,
You need a server side technology to send data back and forth via web sockets. Socket.io is a communication layer. Which means, you need to have a server side method to send data.
However,
You can use various third party services to use web sockets and notifications. They are relatively easy to use, and they have support for many other languages.
Check some of these out:
http://pusher.com/
https://www.firebase.com/
http://www.pubnub.com/
https://www.tambur.io/
https://fanout.io/
You don't need to run Node.js to have a real time push notifications. You can use a third party service that does it for you. Most of them are cheap, sometimes free for low traffic instances.
There will be no human being in the loop, and both endpoints are autonomous Node.js applications operating as independent services.
Endpoint A is responsible for contacting Endpoint B via secure web socket, and maintaining that connection 24/7/365.
Both endpoints will initiate messages independently (without human intervention), and both endpoints will have an API (RESTful or otherwise) to receive and process messages. You might say that each endpoint is both a client of, and a server to, the other endpoint.
I am considering frameworks like Sails.js and LoopBack (implemented on both endpoints), as well as simply passing JSON messages over ws, but remain unclear what the most idiomatic approach would be.
Web Sockets have a lot of overhead for connecting to browsers and what not, since they try to remain compatible with HTTP. If you're just connecting a pair of servers, a simple TCP connection will suffice. You can use the net module for this.
Now, once you have that connection, how do you initiate communication? You could go through the trouble of making your own protocol, but I don't recommend it. I found that a simple RPC was easiest. You can use the rpc-stream package over any duplex stream (including your TCP socket).
For my own application, I actually installed socket.io-client and let my servers use it for RPC. Although if I were to do it again, I would use rpc-stream to skip all the overhead required for setting up a Web Socket connection.
I set up a Node.js HTTP server. It listens to path '/' and returns an empty HTML template on a get request.
This template includes Require.js client script, which creates Socket.IO connection with a server.
Then all communication between client and server is provided by Web Sockets.
On connection, server requires authentication; if there are authentication cookies then client sends them to server for validation, if no cookies then client renders login view and waits for user input, etc.
So far everything works, after validating credentials I create a SID for user and use it to manage his access rights. Then I render main view and application starts.
Questions:
Is there a need to use HTTPS instead of HTTP since I'm only using HTTP for sending script to the client? (Note: I'm planning to use Local Storage instead of cookies)
Are the any downfalls in using pure Web Sockets without HTTP?
If it works, why nobody's using that?
Is there a need to use HTTPS instead of HTTP since I'm only using HTTP
for sending script to the client? (Note: I'm planning to use Local
Storage instead of cookies)
No, HTTP/HTTPS is required for handshake for websockets. Choice of HTTP or HTTPS is from security point of view. If you want to use it for simply sending script then there is no harm. If you want to implement user login / authentication in your pages then HTTPS should be used.
Are the any downfalls in using pure Web Sockets without HTTP?
Web sockets and HTTP are very different. If you use pure Web Sockets you will miss out on HTTP. HTTP is the preferred choice for cross-platform web services. It is good for document traversal/retrieval, but it is one way. Web socket provides full-duplex communications channels over a single TCP connection and allows us to get rid of the workarounds and hacks like Ajax, Reverse Ajax, Comet etc. Important thing to note is that both can coexist. So aim for web sockets without leaving out HTTP.
If it works, why nobody's using that?
We live in the age of HTTP, web sockets are relatively new. In the long term, web sockets will gain popularity and take up larger share of web services. Many browsers until recently did not support web sockets properly. See here, IE 10 is the latest and only version in IE to support web sockets. nginx, a wildly popular server did not support web sockets until Feb-March 2013. It will take time for web sockets to become mainstream but it will.
Your question is pretty similar to this one
Why use AJAX when WebSockets is available?
At the end of the day they were both created for different things although you can use web sockets for most, if not everything which can be done in normal HTTP requests.
I'd recommend using HTTPS as you do seem to be sending authentication data over websockets (which will also use the SSL, no?) but then it depends on your definition of 'need'.
Downfalls - Lack of support for older browsers
It's not used this this in many other situations because it's not necessary and it's still 'relatively new'.