Balena Dash to display another container port

Product support
,
1

I modified the balena dash project to also include a node red container. Balena dash is on port 8080 and the node red has a dashboard that is on another port, say 1080. Plugging into the HDMI port i can pull up different web pages onto the screen and confirm that is working fine. However if i go to the Tohora interface and try to bring up the port for the dashboard on node red it say connection refused. I have tried http://localhost:1080, https://localhost:1080, and 127.0.0.1:1080 with no luck. I can access that port if i type in the IP into another machine on my network, so I confirmed the node red is running fine. It just seems to be having an issue with accessing across containers, or something I am not seeing. Are there any suggestions how to rememdy this?

3

Hey there.
If I understand correctly, you want to display the node-red dashboard on the kiosk display?

This might be because the containers are not in the name network namespace. You can try one of the following:

  1. Try to access the node-red container as http://:1080 from tohora. So assuming you named it node-red in your docker-compose, the url would be http://node-red:1080
  2. You can set the services network_mode to host in your docker-compose.yml which allows the container to share the same network namespace as the host OS. This would need to be set for both the kiosk and node-red services

You can refer to the docs here for further details.

Let us know if this works for you.
Cheers,
Rahul

5

Thanks for the quick reply. I tried #1, that did not work. I have not tried #2 yet. I was using hypotheticals before and perhaps I need to make my goal more clear because I have a feeling maybe there is an easier way. The node red catiner is tied to port 80. When you go to the public URL, the dashboard is automatically displayed as that’s how I wanted it set up. I am trying to come up with a solution where if the network goes down and there is no way to access the balena board, that someone would have the ability to plug in a screen and interact with the node-red dashboard locally, either with a touchscreen or through the HDMI port and a mouse. Is there an easier way to have the node-red dashboard automatically pushed to the hdmi/displayport, or is using the Tahora web package the best way?