Return empty list in Starlark to hide app

Support
1

I’m self-hosting my app. Looking through the community apps I see that returning an empty list in my Starlark app may be a way to hide the app during Tidbyt app rotation. I found this example in the severewxalertusa app. Using “pixlet render” with my app returning an empty list produces an empty webp file as I would expect however when I try to push this to my Tidbyt, I get the error:

Tidbyt API returned status 400 Bad Request
{“code”:3,“message”:“provide an image”,“details”:}
Error: Tidbyt API returned status: 400 Bad Request

Is it not possible to hide an app using this technique when self hosting? Is there another method of hiding an app? Pushing a blank image just shows a blank Tidbyt display which is not what I want. If there is no way to hide, then I suppose I can just call the tidbyt api with the http delete method https://api.tidbyt.com/v0/devices//installations/ when there is nothing to display.

Best

Larry

2

The way I do this is to check for a zero size webp and if so then use the api to delete the app instance from the tidbyt.

here is how I do it in python

                # if webp filesize is zero then issue delete command instead of push
                if os.path.getsize(webp_path) == 0:
                    if app.get('deleted') != 'true': # if we haven't already deleted this app installation delete it
                        command = ["/pixlet/pixlet", "delete", device['api_id'], app['iname'], "-t",  device['api_key']]
                        print("\t\t\t\tWebp filesize is zero. Deleting installation id {}".format(app['iname']))
                        result = subprocess.run(command)
                        app['deleted'] = 'true'
                    else:
                        print("\t\t\t\tPreviously deleted, doing nothing")
3

Thanks Tavis for the example!