balenaEngine CLI

Are there pre-built binaries of the balenaEngine CLI available anywhere? Our devices ship with a utility container intended for initial device setup/provisioning (in the sense of working out what we need to communicate with once installed on site), and it would be really useful to be able to do things like tailing logs, or entering other containers from it, as we can then add some small scripts to make that a smoother process than it is from the host OS.

Hello!

We are currently working to have balenaEngines binaries automatically generated and published to our GitHub repository. You can thus get some of the more recent releases here: Releases · balena-os/balena-engine · GitHub

However, there’s an alternative you may want to consider. If you add the io.balena.features.balena-socket label to your container, we’ll bind mount the balenaEngine socket into it and set the DOCKER_HOST env var accordingly. This way, if you run a regular Docker binary in the container, it will use the daemon running on the host OS. I believe this would allow you to do everything you described, and may be easier to implement (e.g., by using the package manager in your base image distro to install Docker). Check our docs here for more details: Multiple containers - Balena Documentation

Please let us know if this answers your question or if you have any further doubts!

Regards,
Leandro