Is it possible to use the state of an application on a Mac as condition through NodeRed?

Third party integrations Node-RED
1

Running HASS.io on RPi3 with NodeRed.

I’m wondering if there’s a way for HA to check another desktop workstation on the same network to see if a specific application is running or not, then respond accordingly.

Possible?

2

I would run a script on the machine with the application that checks “top” with grep and then mqtt to HA or directly with the api.

3

So, would you have the process run on the mac, then have that workstation fire off a payload to HASS.io?

If so, wouldn’t that require a regular cron job to keep HA up to date like the Polling node in NodeRed?

4

You could run a python script on the Mac with a cron job every minute if you don’t need instance notification. If you did, you could run a python script to run continuously in the background.

If you have a MQTT server, I would just get the Mac python script to publish something on the mqtt server. I would then get HA to use mqtt trigger in automation or create a mqtt sensor.

5

or you could use this custom sensor if that is allowed in hass.io.

6

You can do this if you install NodeRED on your mac also, then use the ps command to find your running process

7

I like this idea, but hasn’t the configuration of the custom component changed? Shouldn’t the folder be named ssh instead of sensor?

8

~/.homeassistant/custom_components/ssh/sensor.py