New Hubitat CLI for Backups and Certificates

February 16, 2022

One of the devices I use in my home is a Hubitat Elevation hub. Similar to SmartThings or even Google Home, it integrates a wide range of devices, protocols, and apps to help make a "smart" home. I originally chose the Hubitat because of its good support for local and private automation (rather than expecting the internet to always be working and fast).

Keeping with the theme of local operations, I automate some of its management tasks. Historically I downloaded backups and rotated certificates with shell scripts, but Hubitat does not support a formal API and the scripts have always felt a little fragile. This week I decided to convert them into a standalone hubitat-cli binary (written in Go) which is much easier to test, maintain, and use. Now, instead of ~20 lines for my backup task, I can just run:

hubitat-cli backup download

2022/02/16 08:47:16 hubitat-cli: "level"=0 "msg"="downloaded backup file to Hubitat_2022-02-16~2.3.0.124.lzf"

And, instead of ~40 lines to update certificates and reboot the hub, I can run:

hubitat-cli advanced certificate update --certificate-path=tls.crt --private-key-path=tls.key

2022/02/16 08:48:37 hubitat-cli: "level"=0 "msg"="updated certificate"
2022/02/16 08:48:37 hubitat-cli: "level"=0 "msg"="requested reboot"

I use Kubernetes to coordinate these tasks, so it's also available as a small (~8MB) image:

docker run ghcr.io/dpb587/hubitat-cli

For interacting with Hubitat

Usage:
  hubitat-cli [command]

Available Commands:
  advanced    For advanced features
  backup      For managing backups
  reboot      For restarting the hub

Flags:
  -h, --help                  help for hubitat-cli
      --hub-ca-path string    custom certificate authorities to trust ($HUBITAT_CA_PATH)
      --hub-insecure          disable TLS verifications ($HUBITAT_INSECURE)
      --hub-password string   password for login ($HUBITAT_PASSWORD)
      --hub-url string        URL for accessing the hub (e.g. http://192.0.2.100; $HUBITAT_URL)
      --hub-username string   username for login ($HUBITAT_USERNAME)
  -v, --verbose int           verbosity level

Use "hubitat-cli [command] --help" for more information about a command.

You can learn more from github.com/dpb587/hubitat-cli, and test it out yourself by downloading the binary for Linux, macOS, or Windows from the releases page.