As part of my home automation system, I like to be able to shutdown my computer remotely. This way I can safely shutdown the computer before powering it off at the wall.

The challenge is: how do I make the computer respond to the message and instigate a shutdown?

This is not a new challenge, and there are personal-project utilities all over the place which achieve the goal. Previously I was doing this with software called MqttClient, a .NET GUI which ran on Windows. Now that I’m splitting my time between multiple operating systems, I wanted a small, cross-platform utility which could run quietly in the background and subscribe to shutdown requests.

Introducing: mqcontrol

mqcontrol is yet another MQTT remote control utility. It’s small, cross-platform, CLI-only and availble as a Docker image. The source is available on GitHub.

How I’m using mqcontrol

Remote hibernate as part of “safe off” script

I’m using mqcontrol as part of a computer shutdown script. When I activate the script, Home Assistant does the following:

1. Send the command to hibernate the computer
2. Wait for the computer power draw to drop below 20W
3. Switch off the computer at the wall after a delay

Here’s a basic version of what that script looks like in Home Assistant YAML configuration:

computer_off_safe:
  alias: Turn computer off safely
  sequence:
    - service: mqtt.publish
      data:
        topic: "flat/abedroom/pc/hibernate"
        payload: ""
    - wait_template: "{{ states('sensor.computer_power')|int < 20 }}"
      timeout: "00:02:00"
      continue_on_timeout: "false"
    - delay:
        seconds: 2
  - service: switch.turn_off
    data:
      entity_id: switch.computer_plug

mqcontrol runs on the computer and listens for the hibernate command.

On Linux I use systemd to run the following command at boot:

mqcontrol -c "systemctl hibernate" -t flat/abedroom/pc/hibernate

On Windows I use task scheduler to run an analogous command on login:

mqcontrol.exe -c "shutdown /h /t 0" -t flat/abedroom/pc/hibernate

This way it doesn’t matter which OS I’m booted into; the command will always cause a hibernate.

Learnings

For a small one-weekend project, I managed to learn a ton while developing mqcontrol. I’ll be writing more about these for sure!

• Basics of Golang and its tooling.
• Docker BuildKit and three-stage Dockerfile to use build stage for both artifact generation and runtime image creation.
• Docker Buildx to build and push cross-platform Docker images - but using Go cross-compilation on the build platform to eliminate the need for expensive emulation.
• GitHub Actions and Docker-out-of-Docker for releases based on Git tags and automated CI/CD.