This is a simple Django project that displays battery and WiFi status.
Note
For complete details, see full documentation at Read the Docs.
The project uses DBus to gather information from UPower and NetworkManager -while DBus is over-engineered and annoying, it provides a very high-level interface (including battery history and time remaining estimation for UPower, and full SSID list for NetworkManager - even when connected and running without root privilege). It should hopefully be less prone to bit-rot than scraping /sys/class/power_supply/* files, parsing the output of iwscan and so forth.
While using the pygi (GObject Introspection for Python) interface for NetworkManager would be less painful than using the DBus interfaces, we'd still need DBus for UPower, and the GObject libraries could drag in GNOME dependencies that wouldn't otherwise be necessary.
On a system using wicd for network connection management, the rather limited DBus interface that it provides doesn't offer anything useful, so using iwscan would be more tempting, but it would be much slower.
Instead of UPower, earlier versions of Linux power management support a mostly compatible DeviceKit/Power DBus API, which is supported (although untested). Very old Ubuntu (<9.10) used the rather different HAL DBus API, that is not supported.
Python 2.7 is required, and you have to update to pip version 20.3.4 to download packages from PyPI due to deprecation of TLS < 1.2.
The dbus support requires some apt packages; for Ubuntu 20.04 they are:
- build-essential
- libpython2-dev
- libdbus-1-dev
These should be installed first.
You can install this package and its dependencies with pip:
$ pip2 install git+https://github.com/dupuy/ulm.gitYou can then run it (for testing purposes) using Django's runserver:
$ ulm runserver
Validating models...
0 errors found
Django version 1.11.29, using settings 'ulm.settings'
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.You can also clone the Git repository and run it from the source directory:
$ git clone https://github.com/dupuy/ulm.git
$ cd ulm
ulm$ pip2 install -r requirements/local.txt
ulm$ python2 manage.py runserver
Validating models...For anything more than that, you will want to run it under a real webserver as described below in the Deployment section.
If you want to make this a standard service running on the laptop, you will probably want to install a webserver with WSGI interface, such as apache2+mod-wsgi, gunicorn, nginx+gunicorn or nginx+uWSGI.
I wrote this as a programming challenge in 2013 when I was applying for a position at Lite Elements (a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom in Berlin). It is written using Python 2.7, and as I don't have a laptop or a real need for this project, I won't be porting it to Python 3. I have updated it to the most recent versions of packages that still support Python 2.7, which closed all dependabot security alerts as of 2023-08-12 (~10 years later).