Locally accessing a container GUI on BalenaOS

Product support balenaOS
1

I’ve decided to go deeper than I had previously with containerized computing but I realized that I had, what seems to be, an odd question. If I were to containerize an application with a necessary GUI, (Kodi and a Plex client, are my primary examples) would I be able to access their GUI’s from the local machine? This is the only thing right now keeping me from jumping into containers fully since the Raspberry Pi that I want to repurpose is currently a small media center triple-booting Raspbian, Libreelec, and Lakka.

Thanks for any help you can give me on this issue.

2

Hello @cardcaptorrlh85,
Yes, you can use multiple containers and access them from your local machine using the local ip address.

Keep in mind that you will need to change the port for each container. as most of them usually are served on port 80.

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Keep us posted with progress, this sounds very interesting!

All the best

5

I don’t think I made myself clear. I was talking about trying to access the containers from the same machine they’re hosted on. Is there a way to do that built in to BalenaOS or would I be building it myself?

6

Hi there @cardcaptorrlh85,

If what you mean is to communicate with various containers locally, you can set network_mode: 'host' in the docker-compose.yml file that defines your application’s various services. You can then communicate freely between containers via bound ports on localhost. This feature is documented here.

I hope this information helps, but please let us know if we are still missing something!