This is meant to be a cli interface to the Raspberry Pi Connect service. It uses connect.raspberrypi.com as a signaling service to negotiate a direct UDP connection to your raspberry pi device. It will eventually perform UDP hole-punching on its own.
I have some raspberry pi devices that I want to access from around the world,
so I appreciate that Raspberry Pi Connect exists as a service, and that there
is an option to connect directly to the shell.
What I find lacking is that I need to do all of this in the browser.
I much prefer to make an SSH connection, but it is difficult for networks
where you need to traverse both Network Address Translation (NAT) and Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT).
Therefore, I figured I would write rpi-cli to establish the WebRTC connection
with my raspberry pi device.
Unlike the port forwarding required for running a VPN via WireGuard,
rpi-connect relies on WebRTC to use Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) to
find the most direct peer-to-peer connection.
More importantly, it uses its own Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) and
Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) servers to ensure a robust and secure connection.
A caution that rpi-cli relies on a private file relative to the home directory in order to
manage cookies (unless you would like to continuously log into your RPI account).
This repo can be cloned and installed by running,
git clone https://github.com/CraigYanitski/rpi-cli
cd rpi-cli
./installThe rpi-cli binary will be built and moved to ~/.local/bin/, which should be in your
executable path.
rpi-cli is simple to use so long as you have a Raspberry Pi account.
The client will first ask you to sign in if it has not already done so.
I of course cannot show my login details, but below is an example of use provided you have
already logged in using the rpi-cli client.
Rather than waiting for the application to prompt you for your email and password,
you may alternatively login by placing a .env file in ~/.rpi-cli/ with your email and
password in the RPI_EMAIL and RPI_PW variables, respectively.
Or you can place them as the CLI arguments -email and -password.
Just note that these login methods cannot be mixed, so your email and password must be
entered using just one of these methods.
In any case, your cookies will be saved in the directory ~/.rpi-cli/, so you only need
to login once.
A future commit might make the saving of cookies optional for increased security.
This is in the early stages at the moment. I started with a rather lengthy bash script to make sure I get the appropriate responses, but I have since moved everything into a Golang client. Now the client is functional, but there are many quality of life updates to be made. Please feel free to fork this repository and contribute to its development.
# Clone
git clone https://github.com/CraigYanitski/rpi-cli
cd rpi-cli
# Make edits
go build .Please also feel free to suggest improvements that should be made.