InstallationWebInterfaceNginx

Plot Charts via Nginx

The following instructions were provided by Seri Al-Najjar for using Nginx instead of Apache. Follow the instructions for Logging to a Database before continuing.

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As the Heatmiser-WiFi Perl web interface uses CGI scripts, and nginx only supports FCGI, to be able to get everything to work together, we need another server or daemon that nginx can talk to and proxy the CGI access to.

The most lightweight solution I found for this was to UWSGI (be sure to check that your nginx install was built with uwsgi support).

These instructions have been used and tested on Gentoo, however, it shouldn't be too complicated to modify them for other Linux distributions.

UWSGI Configuration

Install uwsgi if you haven't done so already:

emerge -av uwsgi

Once installed, create an application specific configuration for proxying & interpreting CGI files:

cp /etc/conf.d/uwsgi /etc/conf.d/uwsgi.cgi

Modify the following lines in the /etc/conf.d/uwsgi.cgi file:

UWSGI_PROGRAM=/var/www/localhost/uwsgi
UWSGI_XML_CONFIG=/var/www/localhost/uwsgi/cgi/config/config.xml
UWSGI_LOG_FILE=/var/log/uwsgi/uwsgi.cgi.log

Create a folder structure to hold our UWSGI application and configuration:

mkdir -p /var/www/localhost/uwsgi/cgi/config

Create a configuration XML file for CGI proxying, this configuration file instructs UWSGI to listen on the loopback adapter on port 3128, to present a virtual /cgi-bin directory that serves the files located in /var/www/localhost/cgi-bin, and lastly, to only serve files that end with a .cgi or .pl extension:

vi /var/www/localhost/uwsgi/cgi/config/config.xml

<uwsgi>
    <plugins>cgi</plugins>
    <socket>127.0.0.1:3128</socket>
    <cgi>/cgi-bin=/var/www/localhost/cgi-bin</cgi>
    <cgi-allowed-ext>.cgi</cgi-allowed-ext>
    <cgi-allowed-ext>.pl</cgi-allowed-ext>
</uwsgi>

Lastly, create a init script instance to start the UWSGI CGI application, set it to start at boot and then start it manually for the time being:

cp /etc/init.d/uwsgi /etc/init.d/uwsgi.cgi
rc-update add uwsgi.cgi default
rc-service uwsgi.cgi start

UWSGI should now be fully configured and functional, listening on port 3128 and serving any CGI files that are located in /var/www/localhost/cgi-bin.

Configuring NGINX to interface with UWSGI

Update your NGINX configurations HTTP section to add the following alias and redirect:

location ~ /cgi-bin {
    include uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS 200;
    uwsgi_modifier1 9;
    uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:3128;
}

And restart NGINX:

rc-service nginx restart

Configuring the Heatmiser Perl Web Application

From the heatmiser-wifi/bin directory, copy the following files into the web cgi-bin directory (/var/www/localhost/cgi-bin/):

• ajax.pl
• heatmiser_config.pm
• heatmiser_db.pm

From the heatmiser-wifi/bin directory, copy the index.html file to whatever directory in your web root you want to make the interface available from (i.e.):

mkdir /var/www/localhost/htdocs/thermostat/
cp theheatmiser-wifi/bin/index.html /var/www/localhost/htdocs/thermostat/index.html

And download the jQuery and Highcharts Highstock JavaScript libraries:

wget http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.2.min.js -O /var/www/localhost/htdocs/thermostat/jquery-2.0.2.min.js
wget http://code.highcharts.com/stock/1.3.2/highstock.src.js -O /var/www/localhost/htdocs/thermostat/highstock.js

You should now be able to browse to your server/thermostat to view the web interface.