Getting started

MisterHouse is written in Perl. This basically means you can run it on any platform of your choice, as long as it has a Perl interpreter.

This article shows you the basics of installing MisterHouse. Note that it tries to be a short and clear document that explains the idea behind installing MisterHouse. It does not detail installing some specific add-ins like Text-To-Speech and the speech recognition engine.

Where to get MisterHouse

The MisterHouse code base is maintained in the git repository that accompanies this wiki. You have the option to either download a release version or to checkout a version from the git repository. The option you choose depends on your goal: if you want just to download a file and to get started, you can download a release. On the other hand, if you want to be able to easily apply changes made by other developers, checking out the git repository is the way to go.

Whatever option you choose, the idea is to install the MisterHouse main code in a subfolder that is separated from your local code and settings. The reason to do so is that it is then easy to replace MisterHouse with a newer version without losing your local modifications.

• To download a release version, head here
• To clone the git repository, see the documentation here
• To cooperate on the source code as a developer, see here

Recommended way to install MisterHouse

The idea is to create a folder that can keep your local settings, and a folder that contains the MisterHouse base code. You already got a copy of that code from the previous step. Now, how to setup the system:

• create the folder that will contain all Misterhouse code and custom settings, e.g. 'mrhouse'
• cd into the folder
• create a subfolder called 'misterhouse' and copy the content of the tgz file into it, or perform a git clone as described above.
• create a folder called 'local'. This folder will contain your settings.
• create a folder called 'data' and a folder called 'code' under local. Those folders will be used to store data and code for running MisterHouse.

The directory structure is now:

  mrhouse
   +-> misterhouse
   +-> local
        +-> code
        +-> data

Create a file called 'mh.private.ini' in the folder 'local'. This file will contain your custom settings to control certain settings of misterhouse.

A basic initial version of the mh.private.ini file should look like this:

code_dir=$Pgm_Root/../local/code
data_dir=$Pgm_Root/../local/dat
gd=0
tk=0

Create in the mrhouse folder a script file with this content:

export mh_parms=<absolute path to>/mrhouse/local/mh.private.ini
cd misterhouse/bin
./mhl

This script does the following: it tells MisterHouse where to find your custom settings, and then it starts the MisterHouse program.

If all goes well, you should be able to navigate to the web interface on http://localhost:8080

Where to go from here

After playing around with the basic install, you can start adding your own devices.

If things go wrong

This article is a short overview of how to get MisterHouse up and running. If you want to get the details of it, info can be found here and here. Also, if you get stuck, you can ask the friendly people at the mailing list for help.