cscli — CarStream terminal client

A small Python CLI that talks to your CarStream server over HTTPS + WebSocket. Live ASCII gauges, sparklines, RPM/Speed trend chart, single-field giant readouts, raw JSON streaming, and a one-shot health check — all from the terminal.

┌──── CarStream — Audi Q8 ──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│    RPM   ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░    3420 rpm   ▁▂▄▆█▆▄▃▂▁▂▃▅▇█│
│  Speed   ██████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░      72 km/h  ▁▁▂▃▄▆▇█▇▆▅▄▃▂▁│
│ Throttle ███████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░     23  %    ▁▁▂▂▃▃▄▅▆▆▆▅▄▃▁│
│   Load   ████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░      14  %    ▁▁▁▂▂▃▃▄▄▄▃▃▂▁▁│
│ Coolant  ███████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░      91 °C    ▆▆▆▇▇▇▇█████▇▇▆│
│    Oil   ███████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░      97 °C    ▅▅▆▆▆▇▇▇▇█████▇│
│   Fuel   ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░      56  %    █████▇▇▇▇▆▆▆▅▅▅│
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌──── Trend (last ~60 frames) ──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 6000┤  RPM ─                                            ╭─╮           │
│ 4000┤  Speed ─               ╭───╮                  ╭───╯ ╰─          │
│ 2000┤              ╭─────────╯   ╰──────────────────╯                 │
│    0┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────       │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌──── Status ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Car:    Audi Q8                                                       │
│  Status: ONLINE                                                        │
│  GPS:    48.91968, 24.70627                                            │
│  Maps:   Open in Google Maps ↗                                         │
│  Frame:  0.2s ago                                                      │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Install

# from PyPI
pipx install carstream-cli

# or from a local checkout
cd cli && pipx install .

# or in a regular venv
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install carstream-cli

Python ≥ 3.10.

Subcommands

Usage

Auth

cscli login                              # defaults to https://carstream.live
cscli login --server http://localhost:8000 --email me@example.com
cscli logout

Live ASCII dashboard

cscli dashboard                          # auto-picks if you have one car
cscli dashboard --car "Audi Q8"          # or --car <car_id>, for a specific car

What you see:

• Gauge cluster with bar + color-coded value + 60-sample sparkline per metric
• RPM/Speed trend chart over the same window (plotext, two y-axes)
• Status panel: car name, ONLINE / STALE / OFFLINE pill (5s / 30s thresholds, matches the web UI), GPS, frame age, and an OSC-8 Open in Google Maps ↗ link to the current point.

The Status panel pre-fetches /api/telemetry/<id>/last_position on startup so the GPS row + Maps link are populated immediately, even before the first WebSocket frame. While showing the parked position the GPS line is suffixed with (last known) in yellow and a Parked: <ISO timestamp> row appears below; both go away as soon as a live GPS-bearing frame arrives.

The Maps link uses OSC-8 hyperlinks — clickable in iTerm2, modern xterm, gnome-terminal, wezterm, kitty; plain text on terminals that don't support it.

Ctrl-C exits cleanly.

Watching a single field

cscli watch speed                        # giant ASCII number, sparkline below
cscli watch rpm --font slant
cscli watch fuel_level --font doom

Useful for putting on a secondary monitor or a Pi Zero in the kitchen.

Streaming raw frames

cscli tail                               # one JSON object per line, raw
cscli tail --pretty                      # pretty-printed JSON
cscli tail --field rpm                   # only frames carrying that field; output is {field, ts}

# Pipe to your own tools:
cscli tail | jq 'select(.speed > 100)'
cscli tail --field rpm | awk -F'"rpm":' '{print $2}'
cscli tail --field fuel_level | jq -r .fuel_level | datamash mean 1

The hot path skips JSON parsing entirely and writes the raw WS frame straight to stdout — your downstream consumer can re-parse if needed.

Health check

cscli status

Server health · https://carstream.live
  ✓ Credentials present (flower.moor@gmail.com)
  ✓ Server reachable (200 in 84 ms)
  ✓ Auth valid (3 cars)
  ✓ WebSocket upgrades successfully

Cars:
  ✓ Audi Q8              ONLINE   1s ago
  ⚠ BMW F36              STALE    18s ago
  ✗ Запор                OFFLINE  never

All systems healthy.

Exits 0 when healthy, 1 on any failed check. Pipe-friendly for cron monitoring:

*/5 * * * * cscli status >/dev/null 2>&1 || \
  curl -X POST <slack-webhook> -d '{"text":"CarStream unhealthy"}'

Offline devices intentionally don't flag a failure (parked car is fine); only network/auth/handshake errors do.

Listing cars

cscli devices

┌─────────┬──────────┬──────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────┬───────────┐
│ Status  │ Name     │ Car ID                           │ Device           │ Last seen │
├─────────┼──────────┼──────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────┤
│ ONLINE  │ Audi Q8  │ a1491b52-0db3-4649-acba-...      │ 89de0a7570734f07 │ 2s ago    │
│ STALE   │ BMW F36  │ 4db27641-09a5-4fc3-bc03-...      │ ed12bab94fccf357 │ 18s ago   │
│ OFFLINE │ Запор    │ —                                │ (unassigned)     │ never     │
└─────────┴──────────┴──────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────┴───────────┘

How it works

• login POSTs /api/auth/login and saves the JWT to ~/.config/carstream/credentials.json (chmod 0600).
• All authenticated GETs send Authorization: Bearer <jwt>. A 401 prints "Session expired. Run cscli login again." and exits non-zero.
• Streaming subcommands (dashboard, watch, tail) open wss://<server>/ws/telemetry/<car_id>?token=<jwt> and merge incoming partial frames into one running snapshot — telemetry/fast carries rpm/speed/lat/lon, telemetry/slow carries coolant_temp/oil_temp/fuel_level, status carries the heartbeat.
• The dashboard buffer is 60 samples per gauge (~6 s at 10 Hz fast frames or ~60 s at 1 Hz slow frames) and renders unicode block sparklines (▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█) auto-scaled to the buffer's min/max.
• The trend panel uses plotext for a real two-axis line chart (RPM left, Speed right). plotext writes ANSI escapes; rich.Text.from_ansi parses them so the colors integrate with the surrounding panel borders.
• The Status panel re-renders once a second so the ONLINE / STALE / OFFLINE pill ages correctly even when no frames arrive.

Auth notes

• Tokens are JWTs from the same backend the web/mobile apps use. They expire (typically 24 h); if a request 401s the CLI prompts you to cscli login again.
• File at ~/.config/carstream/credentials.json is chmod 0600; don't commit it anywhere.
• Self-hosted server? cscli login --server https://your-host and you're done.

Multiple cars

When the user has more than one paired car, every streaming subcommand (dashboard, watch, tail) refuses to auto-pick and lists the cars to pass via --car <name|id> (a car name is matched case-insensitively). With exactly one paired car, --car is optional.

Dependencies

httpx (HTTP), websockets (WS streaming), rich (TUI), plotext (terminal line chart), pyfiglet (giant ASCII text for watch). Declared with lower bounds in pyproject.toml.

Internal layout

cli/carstream_cli/
├── __init__.py
├── __main__.py     subcommand dispatcher (argparse)
├── auth.py         credentials file r/w (chmod 0600)
├── client.py       httpx wrappers + ws_url builder
├── dashboard.py    multi-panel live dashboard
└── util.py         shared helpers — sparkline, frame_field,
                    safe_loads, human_age, online_label/text

util.py is the single source of truth for: WS frame field extraction (top-level vs the JSONB data blob), JSON-with-fallback parsing, sparkline rendering, ISO timestamp parsing, the 5 s / 30 s ONLINE/STALE/OFFLINE thresholds. Add a new subcommand by importing from there instead of re-implementing.

Releasing

CI publishes to PyPI via Trusted Publishing on tag push. The workflow lives at .github/workflows/publish-cli.yml.

One-time setup (PyPI side):

1. Go to https://pypi.org/manage/account/publishing/
2. Add a Pending publisher for carstream-cli:
   • Owner: ypankovych
   • Repository: car-telemetry
   • Workflow: publish-cli.yml
   • Environment: pypi
3. On GitHub, create an Environment named pypi (Settings → Environments → New). Optional: protect it with a manual approval rule.

Cutting a release:

# 1. Bump version in cli/pyproject.toml AND cli/carstream_cli/__init__.py
#    (keep them in sync — the workflow verifies the tag against
#    pyproject.toml only)

# 2. Commit + tag with the matching prefix
git add cli/pyproject.toml cli/carstream_cli/__init__.py
git commit -m "cli: release 0.X.Y"
git tag cli-v0.X.Y
git push origin main --tags

The cli-v* tag triggers publish-cli.yml → builds sdist + wheel → uploads to PyPI as carstream-cli. skip-existing: true makes re-runs safe if the same version already exists. Manual republish is also available via Actions → "Publish cscli to PyPI" → Run workflow.