From asking: Is there a Fing network monitor alternative? To: Maintaining a docker image of Pi.Alert for 1 year and 100k pulls later - it's been fun 😉
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r/selfhostedu/jokob (476)

Comments (34)

That's nice! Especially that it pulls data from pihole and dnsmasq. How is your fork different from pucherot? I see that pucherot hasn't updated for a year now. Any other features your fork provides other than being updated?

Good question:

New features:

  • Docker deploy :)
  • Maintenance with:
  • DB backup / restore
  • CSV export / import
  • Logs
  • Skins (dark mode)
  • German / Spanish translation
  • DB maintenance (delete events, unknown devices..)
  • Configurable Network (visualization) table
  • More notification services
  • Pushsafer,
  • Apprise,
  • Webhook,
  • NTFY,
  • MQTT (Home Assistant)
  • On-Device Nmap scans
  • Scan multiple interfaces
  • ... maybe I missed something

Thanks, that's already a lot! Eager to try this out soon.

Thanks for this!

A few questions before giving it a try: Why should I use yours?

Why should I pick your fork over the other one (or even the original project)? What extra things does yours bring to the table (other than it being activity maintenance)?

Would you be willing to work with the other fork and merge projects (aka pi.alert-ng)?

Do you plans to keep working on this project? Maybe its the wording of the title by "its been fun" makes it sound like you may not be working on it any more thus it too has come to an end?

It looks like upstream (pucherot/Pi.Alert) is dead - no commits since April 2021.

Reading about, there are two active forks:

leiweibau/Pi.Alert: - 412 commits ahead - Last commit: 2022-Dec-15 - Stars: 24 - Dockerhub: ??? - Forked: May 2022 - Issues: 3 open, 24 closed - Pull requests: 0 open, 22 closed - Via the README, how this is an improvement:

Modifications within this Fork - Only one scan cycle - The Backend has the additional option “cleanup” - “pialert-cli” that helps to configure login, password and DB migration - API for basic queries

jokob-sk/Pi.Alert: - 813 commits ahead - Last commit: 2022-Dec-17 (Today!) - Stars: 130 - Dockerhub: here - Forked: Jan 2021 (Before the project went EOL?) - Issues: 3 open, 65 closed - Pull requests: 0 open, 45 closed - README change log: ?

As the README says, this fork exclusively provides a container image while the other fork exclusively provides a direct installation.

Thanks for the reply.

From how I read the README it’s where the code has been tested/used.

My post was me enquiring about new/upgraded features rather than the environment/infrastructure.

New features:

Docker deploy :)

Maintenance with:
    DB backup / restore
    CSV export / import
    Logs
    Skins (dark mode)
    German / Spanish translation
    DB maintenance (delete events, unknown devices..)

Configurable Network (visualization) table

More notification services
    Pushsafer,
    Apprise,
    Webhook,
    NTFY,
    MQTT (Home Assistant)

On-Device Nmap scans

Scan multiple interfaces

... maybe I missed something
  • Not sure about PiAlert-ng.
  • Me and leiweibau have a bit different approaches implementing same functionality so certain things can't be easily merged.
  • don't plan to stop
  • you of course can use any fork you like 😉

Thanks for getting back to me!

Good answers.

Would it be possible to add that to the README in order to help anyone else who may have similar thoughts as me (and not seen this thread)?

Would you be able to give examples how the implementations are different?

That's difficult as both forks are pretty active and we take over each-others features quite often. Will still think about it though, good feedback!

You can submit a PR yourself?

Is saying docker deploy saying it can just be started and it's ready, versus the other one needs to be set up and maintained (possibly in its own containers)?

I'm using watchmylan which is a lightweight "intrusion detector".

I use it with Gotify to give me push notifications when a new/unknown device appears.

Its probably the same idea as yours but without the nice graphs and such.

To be honest (not to criticize your work in any way), it's very rare that a new device appear on your home LAN, so if I was to use your app all the nice graphs and such would probably live empty, while running a db in the background for no reason.

What I essentially need is a notification system that alerts me when I new device enters my LAN.

What's the main perks using your app instead of Watchmylan, in my usecase?

Thank you.

Edit: WatchYourLan. Not watchmylan.

Afaik waychyourlan is more recent so maybe I would have not started maintaining a fork if it was available a year ago.

If you are happy with WYL, don't switch, use it. It's always better to have options 😉

For differences have a look at the replies above. I think my project covers more notification options and a Home Assistant integration for a really quick comparison. Hey someone even did a comparison video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v6an9QG2xF0

Ok I'll have a look!

Am I the only one who I struggling to deploy using the compose file? I’ll log an issue on GitHub but just curious if others are struggling too?

The compose file shown as an example relies on env variables, so deploying as-is doesnt work. You'd need to either use an env, or use the compose examples on the docker registry page.
 
That being said, the container deployment needs some work.
The requirement to manually download and create a database and config file, instead of having them auto-create is not ideal, neither is the very limited selection of environment variables.
 
By no means a bad container, but fixing these to make it easier to deploy will pay dividends for people who just 'want it to work'...which is most people.

I thought I was the only one - typically compose files are a one-shot-and-done type deployment. This one seems to require quite a bit of extra work, relying on hard-coded directory paths, assuming the user is only running it on a Pi with the pi username, etc.

I'll try to set it up and see if I can streamline it. Perhaps the maintainer will welcome some constructive criticism?

I don't see why they wouldn't, it's the beauty of GitHub and OSS.
Worst case, if they dont, just post it here for people to use.

assuming the user is only running it on a Pi with the pi username, etc

  • You don't have to care about this in a docker container, that's the beauty of it.

  • Now I also included a really simple docker-compose example in the README for people who don't use .env files.

manually download and create a database and config file

This is partially due to how the initial developer setup things and by no means ideal. Will definitely look into make this easier :)

Those are good points. I didn't think about auto generating the config if none available. The DB is tricky as even the original project didn't provide the scriptd to do it. It was provided as is. Still possible though and will consider it for further improvements.

This looks awesome, will give it a go!

I searched for something like that. I'll definitely try

Congrats, will give it a try in my setup!

I recently found whatsonmynetwork a nice arp discovery that you can assign names to the known devices

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v6an9QG2xF0 yep, pretty similar use case

At my home i also have a pfsense+ arp watch + telegram bot alerts,i basically get a notification instantly when a new device is on my network

Such a confusing setup, why do i need to download and modify the config file to then mount it separately. I just want to use a docker volume for all the files to live inside like with all my other containers.

If you have a web interface WHY CAN'T I CHANGE THE CONFIG SETTINGS THERE??!?!

Or allow me to specify the settings in ENV variables.

Yeah, probably on the roadmap. There was no UI for managing the application before I took over (the maintenance section) so it will probably be extended. Stay tuned!

I’d definitely be down to hear your story of learning, projects you’ve made, wins and loses. Awesome project btw! Thank you for sharing!

I'm having a real hard time getting this to work on unraid. I've finally got the webpage to load, but it's not logging any devices or events. Logs just keeping circling nginx starting...any unraid users get this working?

Check out the logs and open an issue if you still have troubles figuring it out.

I was able to get it working with unRaid, utilizing the docker-compose plug-in.

Manually created the pialert, config and db folders, then copied over the config and db files from the repo and created the settings_darkmode file using code-server.

The only thing I haven't sorted out is how to make it so when i click on the WebGUI link, it'll take me to the http://[IP]:20211. As of now, it just opens a new tab using the IP of the unRaid machine and bringing me back to the unRaid GUI. Not a huge deal...

Initially it was only showing the Router and my unRaide machine in the devices, so I commented out the local host scan_subnet

Uncommenting the below seems to be working for me. SCAN_SUBNETS = [ '192.168.1.0/24 --interface=eth1', '192.168.1.0/24 --interface=eth0' ]

I have yet to try creating a template for unRaid instead of using the docker-compose plug-in. Maybe that'll be the next thing i try.

one thing I like about Fing is that it gets a lot of data from the devices it dicsovers, it detects type, os, vendor etc.

is this something that can be achieved in Pi.Alert too? I have a lot of devices in my network and it would be a lot of work to transfer all the device-informations from Fing to Pi.Alert

Not yet but part of this idea: https://github.com/jokob-sk/Pi.Alert/issues/28 😉