Connecting the UI to a remote daemon

[Dirt-Nasty]

Has anyone been able to get this to work? I'm using https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Connecting-the-UI-to-a-remote-daemon as a reference written by @dkackman . I'm have the daemon on the remote ports open and I copied the keys to my UI machine but I don't see any of my plots in the farmer tab. I really like the farmer UI stats and since all my plots are on a remote machine I'd love to see them in the UI.

[dkackman]

If you see the URI of the remote daemon in the GUI titlebar and the node status and wallet are updating, then it is working. Managing plots remotely via the GUI hasn't been worked on so the plots don't show up on the farmer tab at this point.

You should see the harvesters in the "Your Harvester Network" section and the Latest Challenge hashses.

[dkackman]

when I run that same thing on my remote hose I get
tcp LISTEN 0 100 0.0.0.0:55400 0.0.0.0:* users:(("chia_daemon",pid=2925,fd=7))

The fact that you still have the loopback address implies the daemon isn't picking up that setting change.

Double check - self_hostname: 0.0.0.0.

If that looks good do this on the host
chia stop all -d
chia start farmer

The -d restarts the daemon which is necessary to pick up that change.

[MilanDeruelle]

Any additional ways to debug this? I modified the "server", added the config file for the "client" as per gist, I added "CHIA_ROOT=~/.chia/mainnet/" to my .profile and .zshrc (running OS X) but I don't see any changes in my chia GUI application. Not sure where to start looking for the problem... any suggestions?

PS: Running sudo ss -tulpn | grep 55400 on the server gives me
tcp LISTEN 0 100 0.0.0.0:55400 0.0.0.0:* users:(("chia_daemon",pid=19777,fd=8))
so I assume, the daemon works fine. However my GUI seems to ignore my config-changes.

[dkackman]

Are you 100% sure that on OSX the path to the mainnet folder is ~/.chia/mainnet/ on OSX? I've seen examples where the home directory is embedded down some levels, but I know next to nothing about MACs.

If the URI of your remote machine does not show up in the title bar of the GUI then the problem is locating the mainnet folder. It should look something like this:

[MilanDeruelle]

I've tried two different things now: Using the prebuild dmg image & building the electron app from source.

DMG: I've managed to get the app to get stuck on "Connecting to Wallet" once. Otherwise it seems it has been ignoring the config file. I'm not a 100% sure though, the titlebar looks different on OS X, so I'm not sure if might just not display it in the titlebar. However, the keys I can choose from are the ones from my local config, not the remote daemon, so I'm assuming that's a sign its not working?

Electron from Source: I additionally used the .env file to make sure the path is correctly set. Starting it from the console I get the following output:

> electron
> electron .

/Users/*MyUserName*/Desktop/chia-blockchain/app.asar.unpacked/daemon
false
Error loading config - using defaults
/Users/*MyUserName*/Desktop/chia-blockchain/app.asar.unpacked/daemon
false
/Users/*MyUserName*/Desktop/chia-blockchain/app.asar.unpacked/daemon
false
Running python script
Script ../src/daemon/server.py
child process success
(node:38237) electron: The default of contextIsolation is deprecated and will be changing from false to true in a future release of Electron.  See https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/23506 for more information
No cert
warning, your CHIA_ROOT is set to ~/.chia/mainnet/. Please unset the environment variable and run chia init again
or manually migrate config.yaml
Chia directory /Users/*MyUserName*/.chia/mainnet
/Users/*MyUserName*/.chia/mainnet already exists, no migration action taken
No cert
Have cert

[dkackman]

This Error loading config - using defaults indicates that the gui couldn't find the config file or it has a syntax error. Find the mainnet/config/config.yaml file and run it through something liek https://yamlchecker.com/. Also make sure that whatever you set VHIA_ROOT to resolves to the location of the mainnet folder.

[dkackman]

I've added some troubleshooting steps to the how-to: https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Connecting-the-UI-to-a-remote-daemon

[NodeGuy]

Yes, I got it to work on macOS by running it from the Terminal like this:

CHIA_ROOT=~/.chia/mainnet /Applications/Chia.app/Contents/MacOS/Chia

[MilanDeruelle]

Thanks so much, that worked like a charm!

[dkackman]

out of curiosity, as I don't have a MAC... does ~ not resolve to /Users/david/?

[NodeGuy]

Indeed it does; I updated my solution above.

[winkee01]

Yes, I got it to work on macOS by running it from the Terminal like this:

CHIA_ROOT=~/.chia/mainnet /Applications/Chia.app/Contents/MacOS/Chia

Can you explain what path that default Chia is using if we don't specify CHIA_ROOT by this way?

[dkackman]

Chia by default looks to whatever the OS considers the current home dir for the user + /.chia/mainnet. So on linux that's something like /home/username/.chia/mainnet and on windows C:\Users\username\.chia\mainnet. I'm not a mac user so I'm not sure exactly what that looks like.