As you can see I recently bought a domain name in order to host a more customisable WordPress blog as well as build a few experiments. One of which is a quick and easy system for logging each of the Raspberry Pi devices that run my custom boot script.
I’d previously created something similar when I got my daughter’s Raspberry Pi to send a tweet whenever it booted up. That was fun but it didn’t scale easily when used with multiple devices. I wanted a central list where all devices were displayed in boot order.
I decided to create a simple MySQL database that could be queried via PHP. The database would contain information sent to it by each Raspberry Pi as it connected to the Internet. I decided initially that I only required device name, username and a timestamp.
I had thought that each Raspberry Pi could run a Python program that opened a connection to the MySQLi database but this appears to be the wrong approach. It seemed much easier to create PHP code that wrote a line to the database using values pulled from the URL (using the $_GET command).
In case it helps, here is some of the PHP to add information to the database:
$sql = "INSERT INTO pilogin (piname, timestamp, username) VALUES ('" . $_GET['piname']."', now(), '" . $_GET['username']."')";
if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) {
echo "New record created successfully";
} else {
echo "Error: " . $sql . "
" . $conn->error;
}
$conn->close();
The final step was to edit /etc/rc.local so that it ran cURL with the appropriate web address and values. I wanted to delay the command until the network connection setup was complete and found that this forum post had a great suggestion for doing this while also allowing other programs to continue running.
I won’t post the actual line for obvious reasons but a similar solution. I’ve also included code that extracts the current Raspberry Pi hostname and user and encodes it into the URL.
Here is an extract from my /etc/rc.local file:
u="$USER" # system variable for user
h=hostname #note the backticks
(sleep 30s; curl "http://webaddress/page.php?hostname=$h&user=$u") &
Happy to hear of any improvements or alternatives!
