Legba The Net-Tracker

Legba allows you to track how long devices have been online on your LAN for the current day. Ideal for parents who want to have and open dialog with their kids about how long they should be online on a day-to-day basis. These same parents need to also enjoy setting up random Python projects ;)

Features:

• Aggregate one person's time across multiple devices
• Display a different histogram for each person
• Optionally get alerts for specific people every 15 minutes of time they use
• Supports light mode or dark mode for UI

The tracking results are shown in an HTML page that automatically reloads the data via AJAX every 60 seconds like this:

Named after Papa Legba

If you like the histograms, check out either Happy Day Histogram (HDH), which Legba uses for a day's activity, or the original Happy Histogram to show a year's activity!

Install

Legba is happy to run on bare-metal via a pip3 and you bring your own web server, or there's a docker-compose file that will build a small layer on top of the official Python 3 Alpine image and lighttpd is used as the web server.

If you're going to use the alert feature in either bare-metal or Docker, you need to run your instance in a Secure Context (aka with TLS).

Bare-metal/VM

Prerequisites

• python
• web accessible directory to view output - defaults to /var/www/html/index.html
• each network device has been statically assigned an IP by your DHCP server.

pip3 and friends

1. Create a legba user who's home directory is /home/legba

2. Clone this repo, cd into it so you're in /home/legba/legba

3. Copy conf.example.py to conf.py

4. Add your devices to conf.py in the trackme variable.

5. Set your output path in conf.py in the html_file variable. Ensure the legba user can write to this file. The default html_file value assumes you're running lighttpd per the Docker setup, but can be set to any path you'd like. Be sure to include the file name too (eg index.html).

6. Install all the python prerequisites with pip3 install -r requirements.txt

7. Copy the systemd file into place, reload systemd, start and enable it:

   sudo cp legba.service /etc/systemd/system/
   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   sudo systemctl enable legba
   sudo systemctl start legba
   

In step 4, you can assign more than one IP to a person. For example if they use a dock with Ethernet which gets a different IP than their WiFi card.

docker-compose

1. Clone this repo, cd into it
2. Copy conf.example.py to conf.py
3. Create a new directory called data in the base of the repo.
4. Add your devices to conf.py in the trackme variable.
5. Run docker: docker-compose up - first time run the image will have to be built.

Legba should be available on http://localhost:9880

In step 3, you can assign more than one IP to a person. For example if they use a dock with Ethernet which gets a different IP than their WiFi card. Or if a someone uses a Nintendo Switch and also an iPad.

In step 5, you can assign a different port with the LEGBA_PORT environment variable like this: LEGBA_PORT=9000 docker-compose up

Troubleshooting

The install steps has you run the service as an unprivileged user legba. Make sure this user exists, owns all the folders and files in /home/legba and can write to the html_file destination. For me, I just did a chown legba /var/www/html.

Check the service to see if it has any errors: sudo systemctl status legba. You can also watch the syslog realtime to further debug: sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog

Todo

• Add github link to output
• Make it a bit more responsive on mobile
• Add first and last time online
• Maybe AJAX or autorefresh or both?
• Add better running instructions - daemonize this!
• Add docker-compose support