Media-web: simple media mac webserver

Media-web is a web server designed to provide access to simple controls of a media centre mac:

• Open and close apps.
• Load a URL in Safari from a bookmarklet.
• Play/pause iTunes and iPlayer (in Safari).
• Sleep/reboot your mac.
• Exit screen saver by moving mouse.

And a few other bits.

Requirements

• Python 2.6 or above (only tested with 2.6)
• Media-web uses the Flask web framework.
• Most in-built commands are mac-specific.

Installation

You need to:

• Install dependencies.
• Update config.py for your setup.

To install dependencies, there are two options:

• Set up a virtualenv for the app. I'd suggest not using the --no-site-packages option.
• If you plan to load the app at startup using the instructions below, use your global python.

Into this virtualenv or your system python, install flask.

If using virtualenv, you need to add the Quartz python bindings to your path. You do this by adding a .pth file to the virtualenv's site-packages folder:

$ vim lib/python2.7/site-packages/coregraphics.pth

Into this file, just put a single line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/PyObjC

Save and quit. Obviously both of these lines need changing if you are not using Python 2.7.

Next, you need to update config.py:

Change the ordering of entries in the order variable if you want.

Add an entry to the screen_resolution stanza with your screen resolution. Remove the examples if you want.

The name you use depends on your hostname, the code used to choose the resolution to use is roughly (see utils.py):

from socket import gethostname
hostname = gethostname().lower()

from config import screen_resolution
for k,v in screen_resolution.items():
    if k in hostname:
        return v

Running the app

To run the app, run python main.py using the python install containing Flask.

Starting at startup

Firstly, it seems like virtualenv python and starting at startup don't mix. At least, the hour of frustration I spent trying to get the app to run from a virtualenv would indicate this. So I suggest just using easy_install flask to install flask into your system python, and being done with it.

To start media-web at startup, you need to add an entry to your system's LaunchAgents. These are stored in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. Create a file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/mediaweb.plist containing:

CTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>uk.co.dx13.mediaweb</string>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>python</string>
        <string>/path/to/media-web/main.py</string>
    </array>
</dict>
</plist>