freecaster-grid

Freecaster grid, buddy home lab death notifier Its purpose is to send telegram notifications in case a home lab in the grid goes down. To do this, it checks a primary lab, to fetch configuration about other nodes, then checks them. Once node is detected down, by a mayority of other nodes, nodes agree which one of them is gona send the telegram message. Then it sends a notif.

freecaster runs a super light weight web server, needs to be mega light weight to ensure we dont take up too many resources.

TLS

If you have a reverse proxy like nginx or caddy in front of freecaster, you can terminate TLS there.

Freecaster can provide TLS on its own! To do this with self-signed certs, you can generate a key and cert with openssl:

# First generate an EC private key
openssl ecparam -name prime256v1 -genkey -noout -out ./keys/private_key.pem

# Then generate a self-signed certificate using that EC key
openssl req -new -x509 -key ./keys/private_key.pem -out ./keys/certificate.pem -days 365 -subj "/CN=localhost"
openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -nocrypt -in ./keys/private_key.pem -out ./keys/private_key.pkcs.pem

Then you can point freecaster to those files in the config:

server:
  ssl: true
  cert_path: "./keys/certificate.pem"
  key_path: "./keys/private_key.pkcs.pem"

Usage

Setup a config file for all participating nodes, generate keys, then start the server with

cargo run --release -- config.yaml

Docker

There is a dockerized version available for deployment.

docker pull ghcr.io/dewyer/freecaster-grid:latest

For an example docker compose configuration, see the compose.yaml file.

We publish multi-arch images for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64.

For the release tags, we use semantic versioning, so you can pin to a specific major, minor or patch version if you want to. If you'd like to get updates automatically, but avoid breaking changes, you can pin to a specific major version like ghcr.io/dewyer/freecaster-grid:0.3. This will get you all 0.3.x releases, but not 0.4.0.

If you want to try the bleeding edge, you can use the main tag, which is built from the main branch on every push.

Configuration

Example config:

name: hal9000
telegram_token: SOME_VERY_LONG_TOKEN
telegram_chat_id: 1234567890
secret_key: SOME_VERY_LONG_SECRET_KEY
webui_enabled: true
server:
  host: "0.0.0.0:3037"
  ssl: false
nodes:
  - name: hal9001
    address: "http://hal9001:3037"
    telegram_handle: hal9001
  - name: hal9002
    address: "http://hal9002:3037"

Testing

There is a dockerized version available for testing, which enables to run multiple instances of freecaster-grid locally. This can be used to test the application as a whole.

docker compose up --build