Hosting own OpenHAB Cloud and iOS notifications

Apps & Services myopenHAB
1

Hi,

I have installed my own instance of OpenHAB cloud. I’m in Australia and the latency back to myopenhab.org was killing me. I’m having some trouble getting notifications to work in iOS however.

I’m confused as to what I should put in the apn section of the config.json

    "apn" : {
      "gateway": "gateway.push.apple.com",
      "cert": "certs/aps/aps_production_cert.pem",
      "key": "certs/aps/aps_production_key.pem",
      "passphrase": "passphrase"
    },

Do I need to get my own certificate through Apple? Or, do I need to use the certificate that has been used to sign the Openhab app that’s in the app store?

I would have thought the latter, as if I get my own certificate, what is stopping anyone from doing so and sending notifications to any app?

If I have to get my own certificate, is there anyway around paying for an Apple Developer account?

Anyway, if someone could explain to me how this works, it would be greatly appreciated.

1 Like
2

Any ideas?

3

You need to register the certs with Apple which means you have to have a developer account. We had a discussion about this in another topic and we were trying to figure out if it was worth changing this to a more open notification system (like pushover.net) or stop using it since you can send notifications other ways using OH. Why do you need notifications from openhab cloud?

4

I am currently using Pushsafer for notifications. Openhab sends an email to Pushsafer, which then sends a push notification to the Pushsafer app.

This requires too much setting up for my users though, who want to install one app and one app only that handles everything. They’re happy to install and configure Openhab, but they won’t install another app purely so they can receive notifications.

I considered getting a developer account in order to get this working, but I can’t justify the cost, especially considering the certificate needs to be renewed annually.

I’m not sure if it’s possible, but it would be great if there was an option to have my instance of Openhab Cloud route notifications via the official myopenhab.org cloud.

5

Could you send me the link to the other topic where this is being discussed please.

6

It’s $99/year so it’s not like it’s too much but still, just for push it’s kind of silly. In order to do what you want someone with a dev account would have to share their private key, not likely.

7

Thanks for sending the link. As I’m not publishing the iOS app, it appears that I can’t get notifications working, even if I was prepared to pay.

I agree, no developer is likely to share their key.

My suggestion was that my instance of the Openhab Cloud could connect to the MyOpenhab.org instance, forwarding the notifications requests to it. My instance of OpenHAB Cloud would manage everything except notifications locally, thus keeping latency low. Notifications, which can’t be sent locally, would be forwarded to MyOpenhab.org, which would then send a push notification on behalf of my instance. Doing this, I wouldn’t need to have the private key locally, they would remain on the MyOpenhab.org instance.

I realise my suggestion would require a bit of work by the OpenHAB developers, but it would mean users could host their own instance of Openhab Coud without sacrificing features.

1 Like
8

I’m developer, where I need to put the certifications to work on my own openhab server and my own iOS Openhab app? Hey, ryandetzel, do you know the procedures? Thanks

9

Just looking at this. I have a developer account. Is this configuration all thats required with a private instance? the certs I have are .p12 files