Google Home and Kodi

I thought I’d take the opportunity to add a Google Home to my gadget collection. After all it’s on a £50 off same this week, so comes in at £79 delivered.

What I really want from it above all is to control my Kodi setup. Being able to voice control what movie or TV show to play would make the wife’s life a lot easier – and when she’s happy, I’m happy.

This is where I came across the GoogleHomeKodi project on GitHub and referenced on the Kodi forum here.

The connectivity to get Google Home to talk to Kodi is somewhat convoluted. There is no direct Google Home to Kodi link. This requires some cloud technology.

Google Home talks to IFTTT, IFTTT talks to the GoogleHomeKodi service, the GoogleHomeKodi service talks to Kodi.

So you need to setup an IFTTT (If This Then That) account and then install GoogleHomeKodi either onto the cloud or onto your own web server. Sounds complicated? It really isn’t that bad. The developers of GoogleHomeKodi have a pretty well documented process for much of it.

Instead of using the cloud install on Glitch, I chose to install the GoogleHomeKodi service onto my Synology NAS. You could install it onto pretty much anything that is capable of running Node.js including the Raspberry Pi you may have Kodi installed on.

First step on the Synology is to go into the Web UI Packages app and select to install Node.js v8 [beta]. This will give us the command line tool needed to run the GoogleHomeKodi program.

Then in the Synology Control Panel in Security open a Firewall port for 8099 so your Google Home can talk to it. You’ll also want to port forward it which you can also do in the Control Panel, Router Configuration as long as your router support UPNP.

Download and extract the GoogleHomeKodi ZIP file into an appropriate folder, I used /volume1/code – as this made it easier to assign permissions to run it as a service later. It’ll extract into GoogleHomeKodi-master by default.

Copy/rename and edit the config file kodi-hosts.config.js.dist in the GoogleHomeKodi-master folder so it is called kodi-hosts.config.js. Change the details within it to match the details of your Kodi server.

Using SSH (Putty) logon to the Synology as admin and change to the GoogleHomeKodi-master path and install the projects dependencies.

$ cd /volume1/code/GoogleHomeKodi-master
$ npm install

Run the server service so you can then see it actually works when you send it instructions.

$ node server.js
Loaded 1 hosts from the config.js
Starting using kodi-hosts.config.js, {"authToken":"mymadeuptoken","listenerPort":"8099","youtubeKey":"AIzaSyBYKxhPJHYUnzYcdOAv14Gmq-43_W9_79w"}
Your app is listening on port 8099

Then you can go about setting up your IFTTT recipes to point at the Synology server:

http://myname.synology.me:8099/[command]

Where myname.synology.me could be an IP address. But it makes things much easier if you’ve registered to use Synology’s DDNS service – it’s free.

eg.

If you need to test things out before you get to speaking to your Google Home you can make these calls to the API using curl. If you’re using a Raspberry Pi with OSMC you can use it from there.

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"token":"mymadeuptoken"}' http://myname.synology.me:8099/stop

You’ll see this on the output for the SSH session  running server.js if you made a successful call. You’ll then also see Kodi carry out your command (as above) if you issue something like:

http://myname.synology.me:8099/playmovie?q=sleeping+beauty

Running as a Service

Now you just need to make the Node.js server.js run as a service or a background process.

I ensured that the proposed service account would have all the necessary permissions to run by placing the GoogleHomeKodi-master into /volume1/code and then setting the permissions using:

$ sudo chmod 777 -Rv /volume1/code

This may be a bit more than it needs, but it’ll do for now. You can tighten this up as necessary using your typical chown/chmod Linux commands.

Then using the guidance from an older blog post here:

http://majikshoe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/starting-service-on-synology-dsm-5.html

I created a file /etc/init/googlehomekodi.conf so it would start as a service.

# only start this service after the network has started
start on syno.network.ready
stop on runlevel [06]

# stop the service gracefully if the runlevel changes to 'reboot'
stop on runlevel [06]

# run the scripts as the 'http' user. Running as root (the default) is a bad idea.
setuid http

# exec the process. Use fully formed path names so that there is no reliance on $PATH
exec /usr/local/bin/node /volume1/code/GoogleHomeKodi-master/server.js

Then to start it and ensure it stays running and stop it use:

$ sudo start googlehomekodi
$ sudo status googlehomekodi
googlehomekodi start/running, process 14378
$ sudo stop googlehomekodi

You can also look in your /var/log/messages to see if anything fails.

References

http://majikshoe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/starting-service-on-synology-dsm-5.html

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=314096