The what and why

When running OSX as a VM, there's no "nice" way of monitoring the host temps (mainly CPU), thus this project. It basically dumps the output of the linux sensors command to an API you can consume.

For my use, I decided to make a menubar applet using xbar, you can check it out here https://github.com/matryer/xbar if you're not already familiar with it.

Installation

1. Clone the repo
2. Install the folowing packages:

   pip install fastapi
   pip install "uvicorn[standard]"

3. Add the xbar_vmhost_sensors_plugin to xbar.
4. Make vmhost_sensors_api.py run on startup. I use a systemctl service, as shown below.

Run script on startup

1. Create the service file like so sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/vmtemp.service
2. Modify the service file to fit your situation.

# Example service: vmtemp.service
[Unit]
Description=VM Temp API

[Service]
ExecStart=<python_location> /<path_to_script>/vmhost_sensors_api.py

User=<user> # this is required else the script will run as admin and fail due to not finding the module>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

3. Enable the service so it runs on startup sudo systemctl enable vmtemp
4. Now run this command to start it sudo systemctl start vmtemp

Configuration

Inside the xbar plugin file you will find these variables.

LOCAL_IP = "192.168.0.1"
LOCAL_PORT = "8004"
LAYOUT_TYPE = "v2"

• You will need to update LOCAL_IP variable so it matches your system one.
• The default API port (8004) is configured through vmhost_sensors_api.py, you can change it if needed, just remember to update the variable LOCAL_PORT in the plugin file.
• Currently there are 2 layouts/groupings available, one is by_adapter ("v1"), the other is by_measurement_type ("v2"). You can switch between them by editing the LAYOUT_TYPE variable in the plugin file.