Remote Device Access for Open Balena

Remote device access utility for openbalena, a platform to deploy and manage connected devices.

Dependencies

This project only requires a running instance of open-balena to work, however you will need to manually enter connection strings in the browser. You can also use this as a component of open-balena-admin which provides a much user interface to remotely access devices.

Configuration

This project relies on one environment variable being set:

• BALENARC_BALENA_URL - The domain of your open-balena instance, i.e. openbalena.local

Installation

Set the required environment variable and run node open-balena-remote.js from the main project folder - and you should be up and running.

Usage

To use open-balena-remote, initiate a GET request to the open-balena-remote server (default port is 10000, can be configured with PORT environment variable)

Query string parameters:

• service - "ssh", "vnc", or "tunnel"; if service is "tunnel", optionally include the initial URL path to access a URL path in that container (i.e. /app-node-red/nr-admin?service=tunnel)
• container - currently only applicable to "ssh" service, specifies which device container to ssh into. Ignored for all other services.
• port - currently only applicable to "tunnel" service, specifies the host port that the service has made a HTTP/HTTPS service available on
• uuid - device UUID to access (short form is acceptable)
• apiKey - balena API key with permission to access requested device UUID

Credits

• This project relies on balena-cli to operate, many thanks to the balena team for developing such a useful and versatile tool