Notes on ScopePort

Usually the Rails SMTP configuration takes place in config/environment.rb like this:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port => 587,
  :domain => "domain.com",
  :user_name => "user@domain.com",
  :password => "password",
  :authentication => :plain
}

ScopePort already has a Email settings part in the setup section where all the required SMTP settings are stored. I wanted to fetch the SMTP configuration from the database to avoid double configuration. I stumbled over this blog post after a while: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/using-multiple-smtp-accounts-w.html Based on this I developed the following dynamic way to define the SMTP settings:

class EmergencyMailer < ActionMailer::Base   
  def load_settings
    @@smtp_settings = {
      :address => Setting.first.mail_server,
      :port => Setting.first.mail_port,
      :domain => Setting.first.mail_hostname,
      :authentication => :plain,
      :user_name => Setting.first.mail_user,
      :password =>Setting.first.mail_pass
    }
  end
 
  def emergency_notification(emergency, email)
    load_settings
    recipients  email
    from        Setting.first.mail_from
    subject     "[ScopePort] An emergency has been declared!"
    sent_on     Time.now
    body        :emergency => emergency
  end
end

The method load_settings gets called by the delivery method and fills the smtp_settings instance variable with parameters from the database.

Check out this Rails Guide if you want to learn more about ActionMailer: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html

You can now install the latest version of the ScopePort client via Rubygems. The gem is hosted at GitHub so you have to add GitHub as a repository first:

root@sundaysister# gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

You can now install the ScopePort client:

root@sundaysister# gem install lennartkoopmann-scopeport-client-ruby

Just start the client with “scopeport-client” if the gem binaries are in your $PATH.

Note that the current client version can only connect to a ScopePort server. It does not send real sensor data yet.

I just pushed a first ScopePort sample client to our repositories. It is written in Ruby, connects to a ScopePort server, logs in and sends a sample sensor data package.

See the source code here: http://github.com/lennartkoopmann/scopeport-client-ruby/blob/665e4d69a93c73fd8055511aae55e88afcfb42c2/scopeport-client.rb

The ScopePort protocol for logging in and sending sensor data is described here: http://scopeport.org/docs/host_communications

Hey, by the way: ScopePort is now on Twitter!

When a gem installation fails with something like “extconf.rb:1:in `require’: no such file to load” you are probably missing the ruby development packages.

On Ubuntu you can fix this by installing the ruby1.8-dev package. (sudo aptitude install ruby1.8-dev)