What is Sensible?

A small tool that provides monitoring for your Linux server via Home Assistant sensors and MQTT discovery.

By default Sensible comes with only a few example sensors, but it is basically a framework that enables you to quickly prototype and implement your own sensors.

The below ongoing video series showcase Sensible and its capabilities along with development news, updates and the feature roadmap.

Why should you use Sensible?

• It's tiny! Currently the binary is approximately 2.4Mb in size! You can put it into a Docker container and you won't even notice it's there!

• Thanks to MQTT discovery, its integration with Home Assistant is as smooth as possible.

  

• Because it follows basic MQTT / Home Assistant standards, it's easy to use with things like Lovelace UI, Node Red, you name it!

  

• It's fully opensource with a permissive license! You can fork it on GitHub and make your own version!

• It has a control REST API that enables disabling sensor data publishing, etc. (still WIP though)

• The developer behind is a veteran with 20+ years of experience, so the project is here to stay, you can expect support and future updates!

Note: Yes, it's probably a temporary name, but I wanted to have something that at least a bit makes sense... (Pun intended!)

How it works?

Sensible is currently a framework application that works with Home Assistant and MQTT discovery. You can configure sensors as plugins for the framework and the sensors will appear in Home Assistant. There are currently two ways to implement sensors, although this part is still under development. First, you can code them in Golang and build them as part of Sensible. Second, you can implement them as unix shell scripts. In this case, you don't need to build Sensible, but you can use a prebuilt binary.

Quickstart guide

• Currently only Linux is supported - if you're running other OSes, sorry, you'll have to wait!

• Grab one of the releases from https://github.com/TheTinkerDad/sensible/releases or build Sensible on your own (see below)

• The .tar.gz file only contains the binary, extract it somewhere convenient.

• Run it the first time with "./sensible -r" and it'll generate the default config file: /etc/sensible/settings.yaml and the required folders

• Edit the config file to customize your settings

• Scripts should be located under /etc/sensible/scripts (or in the folder you've configured in the settings.yaml file)

• You can find the example scripts here or you can start by making your own, they are rather simple

• Add a sensor entry in the config file for each of your scripts like:

  - name: Sensible Host IP Address
    kind: script
    sensorid: ip_address
    script: ip_address.sh
    unitofmeasurement: ""
    icon: mdi:check-network
  

Removing sensors from Home Assistant

If you need to change your Sensible sensors in the configuration.yaml file in a way that it will break entities in Home Assistant, it is highly advised to remove all the sensors from Home Assistant

Building Sensible

Requirements

• Golang 1.14 or newer
• GNU Make
• UPX (Universal Packer for eXecutables) - this one is optional though

Build using make

Sensible is currently being built for Linux, using make:

This one builds the executable and packs it with UPX

make build    

Also builds the executable, but without applying UPX:

make build-noupx

It is also possible to build example code for Docker, etc - see the Example usage section for this.

Configuration

This is currently done via a the file /etc/sensible/settings.yaml

A sample file looks like this one below - if you start Sensible for the first time with the "-r" command line parameter, the very same file will be generated for you.

general:
    logfile: /var/log/sensible/sensible.log
    loglevel: info
    scriptlocation: /etc/sensible/scripts/
mqtt:
    hostname: 127.0.0.1
    port: "1883"
    username: ""
    password: ""
    clientid: sensible_mqtt_client
discovery:
    devicename: sensible-demo
    prefix: homeassistant
plugins:
    - name: Heartbeat
      kind: internal
      sensorid: heartbeat
      script: ""
      unitofmeasurement: ""
      icon: mdi:wrench-check
    - name: Boot Time
      kind: internal
      sensorid: boot_time
      script: ""
      unitofmeasurement: ""
      icon: mdi:clock
    - name: System Time
      kind: internal
      sensorid: system_time
      script: ""
      unitofmeasurement: ""
      icon: mdi:clock
    - name: Root Disk Free
      kind: script
      sensorid: root_free
      script: root_free.sh
      unitofmeasurement: GB
      icon: mdi:harddisk
    - name: Host IP Address
      kind: script
      sensorid: ip_address
      script: ip_address.sh
      unitofmeasurement: ""
      icon: mdi:check-network
    - name: Hostname
      kind: script
      sensorid: hostname
      script: hostname.sh
      unitofmeasurement: ""
      icon: mdi:network
    - name: Platform
      kind: script
      sensorid: platform
      script: platform.sh
      unitofmeasurement: ""
      icon: mdi:wrench-check

Example scripts

There are a couple of scripts under the examples/scripts folders that are also configured to act as sensors in the above example configuration file.

The only requirement for these scripts is that they should be simple, with an execution time no longer than 1-2 seconds and they should only output the value that is meant to be a sensor value. E.g. the ip_address.sh script only outputs an IP / CIDR.

Example usage

• A standalone systemd service on Linux servers
• Plugged into Docker containers as a background process
• Plugged into LXC/LXD containers as a service
• As a standalone service on Raspberry Pi's
• As a system service on Windows

Development and planned features

• Security! MQTT encryption and all the bells and whistles to make it production ready ASAP!
• There should be a way to implement sensors in Go for fully customized sensor data (plugin architecture) without rebuilding Sensible itself
• Documentation for the REST API
• A way to control Sensible via MQTT
• Configuration via environment variables
• A lot of small TODO items in the code