Remote control Raspberry Pi with shell_command and SSH

[Presswerk65 (Ueli Schwander)]

Hi everyone! I’m struggeling with remote controlling a raspberry pi from home assistant with ssh.

shell_command:
7inchpi_brightness: ssh 7inchpi.xxx.xxx sudo sh -c ‘echo “{{ brightness }}” > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/brightness’

1. I run ssh-keygen on Home Assistant (connected as root with ssh), passphrase empty
2. I add the generated public key to the remote pi (home/pi/.ssh/authorized_keys

What am I missing? Even for ‘ssh [email protected] sudo reboot’ I get an Error “255” - whatever that means. Any guru out there who see’s my problem?

[ghvader]

here is one of my commands i use from my shell cmds
speak: /usr/bin/ssh -i /home/hass/.ssh/id_rsa [email protected] ‘/home/hass/speak.sh “”{{phrase}}""’

I have a PI in the kitchen that is connected to a speaker and it makes announcements as needed.

first step in troubleshooting would be to make sure you can execute the command from the CLI and verify it works without issue.

[Presswerk65 (Ueli Schwander)]

Thank you very much! I didn’t realize, that I have to send the private key as parameter. I really appreciate that.

Best regards

[Presswerk65 (Ueli Schwander)]

Well, it works in the CLI, but not as service - still get the Error 255. Have you done additional work on the kitchen side?

[ondras12345 (Ondra)]

There’s a community guide for SSH:

SSH'ing from a command line sensor or shell command

I’ve noticed there’s a significant number of posts looking for help on this topic and the posters all seem to struggle with a few common issues. I realized I’ve been almost copying and pasting my responses on these topics so it seemed like a good case for a community guide. What will this cover This guide will walk through the process of getting a command which ssh’s into another machine to get some simple data ready to be included in a command line sensor. To keep it simple I’ll use the same …

Your problems probably stem from the fact that the shell_command runs inside the Home Assistant container while you are testing your commands outside of it.

[ghvader]

@ondras12345 not everyone runs HA in a container or supervised. I run mine on debian in a virtual environment.

@Presswerk65 if it works via cli then you are half way there. I would next confirm what user is starting/running home assistant. If you are indeed running in a container or supervised, you may have some other sort of issue. I can supervise my own system, so I don’t have any experience with that setup. my other thoughts are to check permissions on your .ssh directory and key files.
I run HA and node-red as root on my machine so it has permissions to access and run shell scripts in my home assistant directory (/home/hass/) two more things I would suggest, (depending on your setup) look at the HA logs or tail -f /var/log/syslog while you fire off the cmd from HA and see what it says while you are doing that.

[Presswerk65 (Ueli Schwander)]

The problem was file permissions, now everything runs - thank you all for your advises!