Moving MSR from a QNAP container to RP 5 - some issues

[xAPPO]

It's like having my own on site developer team Many thanks for that

[xAPPO]

I notice in the MQTT code you subscribe to the root level with a wildcard which means you receive every payload update. On my (untypical) broker this will produce 10’s of message per second. The good thing is Reactor seems to handle it but obviously it’s resource wasteful. Did you do this with a view to implementing discovery across the broker perhaps?

Currently it might seem better to just pull the necessary topics from the MQTTController section of reactor.yaml even though this may result in lots of individual subscribes?

Also just to mention I’ve got my first CBusController half written. It discovers and creates entities for all the 100+ lights I have on my Schneider C-Bus lighting but needs some refining. Learning as I go. Having the MQTT code as an example has been invaluable to me.

Would you be up to releasing the Hubitat and HomeAssistant controller code as examples? I think that would help people in authoring new controllers, as might a minimal code template that does nothing really.

[toggledbits]

When I started writing MQTTController I didn't quite know where it was going to end up or how it was going to get there. It moved a lot from its starting point. I can definitely "tune up" the subscriptions, but discovery is in the mix (it captures certain discovery messages to debug currently but doesn't do much else with them -- still under consideration).

Did you find the probably dated but maybe marginally helpful docs here? https://reactor.toggledbits.com/docs/Building-Controllers/
I've been really busy this week, and suffered a long Internet outage that just recovered a couple of hours ago, but when I'm caught up I'll quickly update some key points and concepts in there.

HubitatController and HassController are very complex pieces of machinery that I don't think would make good examples. Now that I have a few done, one of my tasks is go back and boil out some of the work into common methods or helper classes. I have a lot of work to do on the server API side.

[xAPPO]

@toggledbits said in MQTT interface... time for some testing. Where are my experts?:

Did you find the probably dated but maybe marginally helpful docs here?

Yes I did .. a quick Q - how do I delete an entity ?

The bit I'm adding currently is

If the process may be protracted and lengthy, the Promise should resolve earlier and the entities by published as discovered.

and trying to avoid having to loop through them all on restarts to see if they already exist. This is an aspect that you must have encountered with Hubitat and Hass.

Making good progress and enjoying it .. great application.

[toggledbits]

@xappo said in MQTT interface... time for some testing. Where are my experts?:

how do I delete an entity ?

controller.removeEntity( entity ) -- pass the entity, not just the ID.

@xappo said in MQTT interface... time for some testing. Where are my experts?:

trying to avoid having to loop through them all on restarts to see if they already exist

Define restarts in this context. If you mean restart of Reactor, no entities exist in the version you are running when Reactor starts up. That's about to change, though... entity persistence is coming. If you mean when the connection to the hub is re-established, that's entirely implementation-dependent for your Controller subclass. My subclasses generally reinventory everything, because you don't know how long the hub has been unavailable, and what may have happened to it while it was down.

I just posted a ton of updates to the doc.

[RogerO]

I am trying to install this in Docker and getting the following error:
$ docker exec -it reactorjs /bin/sh cd /home/pi/reactor/ext/MQTTController ./install.sh exit
/bin/sh: can't open 'cd': No such file or directory

Not enough of a linux gut to know what the issue is. Anyone have any hints?

Roger

[toggledbits]

You're reading the wrong direction, I think. See the docs.

Edit 2: OK, getting in sync here again... you've given the wrong pathname to cd. Give it what the documentation says. You're working inside the container -- gotta follow its rules.

[RogerO]

This is the part I used from the instructions:
"docker exec -it <container-name> /bin/sh cd /var/reactor/ext/MQTTController ./install.sh exit"

Results:
pi@RedBMWDeb:/home $ docker exec -it reactorjs /bin/sh cd /var/reactor/ext/MQTTController ./install.sh exit
/bin/sh: can't open 'cd': No such file or directory

Then I tried to determine why the command wouldn't run and determined that maybe the path was wrong on my machine so ran the one in the previous message pointing to the path where MQTTController files were.

pi@RedBMWDeb:~/reactor/ext/MQTTController $ ls
0-README.txt COPYRIGHT MQTTController.js
buildstamp install.sh mqtt_devices.yaml
CHANGELOG.md mqtt_capabilities.yaml package.json

[toggledbits]

It looks like you're trying to do all of those commands on one line. That's not right. You do them one at a time.

[RogerO]

Installing line my line removed that issue. Still running into errors.

Is there a way to determine if the dependencies get installed correctly. I see this on the screen but once I restart reactor it fails.
Installing dependencies...
[..................] \ idealTree:MQTTController: sill idealTree buildDeps.
It sits here for a minute or 2 and then exits. When I modify the reactor.yaml file

  - id: mqtt
    name: MQTT
    enabled: true
    implementation: MQTTController
    config:
      source: "mqtt://192.168.0.16:1883/"

Then I get these error messages in the container logs when ReactorJS starts up
Require stack:

• /var/reactor/ext/MQTTController/MQTTController.js

  at Function.Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:933:15)

  at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:778:27)

  at Module.require (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1005:19)

  at require (node:internal/modules/cjs/helpers:102:18)

  at Object.<anonymous> (/var/reactor/ext/MQTTController/MQTTController.js:22:14)

  at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1103:14)

  at Object.Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1155:10)

  at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:981:32)

  at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:822:12)

  at ModuleWrap.<anonymous> (node:internal/modules/esm/translators:168:29)

[zwavejs-22058]2022-03-01T20:12:27.189Z Controller:CRIT Error: Cannot find module 'mqtt'

[toggledbits]

Dependencies didn't get installed properly. Try running the install script again.

[RogerO]

I have run the install script about five times. Same results every time. Any way to enable better logging?

[toggledbits]

Just run the dependency install manually:

docker exec -it reactor /bin/sh 
cd /var/reactor/ext/MQTTController 
npm i --no-save --omit dev --verbose
exit

If it doesn't succeed, post the full output here, and please use the fenced code block formatting. If you don't know how to do that, read here

[RogerO]

Here is the screen output"

pi@RedBMWDeb:~ $ docker exec -it reactorjs /bin/sh
/opt/reactor # cd /var/reactor/ext/MQTTController
/var/reactor/ext/MQTTController # npm i --no-save --omit dev
npm ERR! code EAI_AGAIN
npm ERR! syscall getaddrinfo
npm ERR! errno EAI_AGAIN
npm ERR! request to https://registry.npmjs.org/mqtt failed, reason: getaddrinfo EAI_AGAIN registry.npmjs.org

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /root/.npm/_logs/2022-03-01T21_10_51_623Z-debug-0.log
/var/reactor/ext/MQTTController # 
/var/reactor/ext/MQTTController # 

The log referenced in the error message is not readily findable.

registry.npmjs.org is findable in nslookup so not lookinhg like a DNS error. Alse turned off pihole incase that was an issue. Still same error.

[toggledbits]

What's your network configuration for this container? This looks like the internal networking of the container can't access the outside world.

[RogerO]

Ok, let me look into that.

[toggledbits]

At the very least, DNS isn't up to scratch inside the container, it appears. You might try this:

docker exec -it reactor /bin/sh
nslookup www.google.com

That's a DNS lookup from inside the container. Should give you several addresses.

[RogerO]

Thinks for the tips. Figured out the DNS issue was a setting in pihole. Had interface settings set to only respond on interface eth0, changed it to local requests and the install script ran fine. Got me some learnin today, thanks,