tapoctl

Control your tapo light bulbs from anywhere on your local network using the command line

Motivation and idea

I wanted to control my tapo light bulbs from my local network but without the necessity of granting them access to my local network (or to the internet at all). Additionally, I wanted to be able to control by light bulbs from the command line.

The idea behind this project is to create a gRPC server which can be hosted on a local device (see example setup with a Raspberry Pi) and which is connected to both your local network and the network containing the light bulbs. It then acts as a proxy and allows you to control your light bulbs from anywhere on your local network without using the proprietary app.

Note

You're still able to use the proprietary app if wanted as long as your smartphone is connected to the same wifi network as your light bulbs are

Additionally, should the cli not meet your needs the use of protocol buffers allows a quick client implementation in any language.

Features

• Cli to control your tapo light bulbs
• Offline control for your tapo light bulbs
• gRPC server which allows easy client integration

Supported devices

The following tapo smart light bulbs are supported:

• L530
• L630
• L510
• L520
• L610
• Generic light bulbs with limited feature set

Since I only own some L530 smart bulbs I can only test the Generic and L530 type. The other light bulb types should work as expected since the L530 seems to have a superset of functionalities.

The provided feature and device support of tapoctl is based off the feature matrix of the tapo crate which is used internally.

If any functionality or your device is missing please open an issue or submit a pull request.

Cli

The cli supports the following commands:

Command	Description	Arguments
devices	List all devices registered on the server
events	Subscribe to live events
set <device>	Update one or more properties of the light bulb	--brightness: Brightness value between 1 and 100 --hue: Hue value between 1 and 360 --saturation: Saturation value between 1 and 100 --temperature: Set color temperature to value between 2500K and 6500K --color: Set predefined google home color --power: Boolean whether to turn the lamp on/off
info <device>	Print current state of the light bulb
usage <device>	Print energy and time usage information for the light bulb
on <device>	Turn the device on
off <device>	Turn the device off
reset <device>	Reset the light bulb to factory defaults
serve	Start the gRPC server. More about this can be read in the server section	--port: Port on which the server should listen

Additionally, there are some global arguments which work with all commands:

Argument	Description
--config	Path to the configuration file which should be used
--json	Print the response from the server as json should there be one
--address	Address used for connecting to the gRPC server
--port	Port used for connecting to the gRPC server
--secure	Use https instead of http to connect to the gRPC server

Configuration

By default, the configuration file is expected to be at $HOME/.config/tapoctl/config.toml. There are two different configuration formats: the client and the server configuration.

The client configuration is used to persist options for connecting to a server whilst the server configuration is used to register devices on the server. The server configuration is documented in the server section in detail.

The following configuration is an example of a client configuration:

# Connect to the server located at `10.10.10.10`
address="10.10.10.10"
# Connect on port `19991` instead of default `19191`
port=19991
# Use http as communication protocol
secure=false

The client configuration is optional and when not specified otherwise everything falls back to default values

Server

The binary includes a gRPC server which can be started using serve command.

The server has to be in the same network as the devices. Should your devices be in another network than your local network (e.g. guest or iot network) you'll have to make sure the device on which the server is hosted is connected to both your local network and the network in which the lamps are located in order for you to be able to control the bulbs from your local network. More about this can be seen in the example setup with a Raspberry Pi.

Configuration

Unlike the client configuration the server configuration is required for a server to be started. It contains your tapo account credentials. Those are needed for constructing the secret needed for interacting with the lamps. Under no circumstances are those credentials used to connect to any (remote) tapo servers.

Additionally, you need to register your devices which then will be accessible through the gRPC api.

# Your tapo account credentials
[auth]
username=""
password=""

# Register a device with the name `lamp-1`
[devices.lamp-1]
type="L530" # The device type of the light bulb (L530, L520, Generic, ...)
address="10.255.255.10" # The address under which the device can be reached

port=19191 # Optional port to listen on. Default: 19191
timeout=10000 # Optional timeout for requests to the tapo api in milliseconds. Default: 10000

Tip

You can find the ip address of your device in the official tapo app or through a arp scan on the network your device is on

When you use something like a pihole and assigned a hostname to your device you can also specify the hostname in the address field

Using docker

The server can easily be set up using the ghcr.io/whysobad/tapoctl docker image. Since you want to communicate with your light bulbs over the network the container needs host network access:

docker run \
  --network host \
  --volume ./config.toml:/home/tapo/.config/tapoctl/config.toml \
  ghcr.io/whysobad/tapoctl

When using docker compose the following configuration can be used:

version: '3.8'

services:
  tapoctl:
    image: ghcr.io/whysobad/tapoctl
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - ./config:/home/tapo/.config/tapoctl/config.toml