MQTT Chromium Control

Monitoring and control of a chromium browser via MQTT. Connects to chrome using chrome debug protocol.

Intended for use with Home Assistant and a Chromium instance as kiosk.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/functionpointer/mqtt-chromium-control.git
cd mqtt-chromium-control
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

1. Launch your chrome with --remote-debugging-port=9222 --remote-allow-origins=* More complete example:

/usr/bin/cage -- /usr/bin/chromium --enable-low-end-device-mode --renderer-process-limit=2 --disable-features=IsolateOrigins,site-per-process --disable-site-isolation-trials --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --kiosk --remote-debugging-port=9222 --remote-allow-origins=* http://127.0.0.1:8123/dashboard-kiosk/0 &

source venv/bin/activate
python -m mqtt_chromium_control

The program will connect to chrome and MQTT, and provide the following entities (with Home Assistant auto-discovery):

• Camera entity, showing a screenshot
• Sensor entity, containing size of the screenshot (useful for simple sanity check of displayed image)
• Button entity, causing chrome to load about:blank and then http://127.0.0.1:8123 (configurable with --tgt-url)

For an overview of available options, run python -m mqtt_chromium_control --help

Systemd Service

There is an example .service file included.

It can be used like this:

ln -s $(pwd)/mqtt_chromium_control.service /etc/systemd/system/mqtt_chromium_control.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start mqtt_chromium_control