Run Companion Dashboard without the Electron frontend

[bost-ty]

Hi Tom!

Thank you for Companion Dashboard. I'm a big fan and have been experimenting with using it on different systems. Naturally, that means I'm running into less-common situations :).

This issue is a request to work around a (perhaps) specific problem I'm having with a new deployment.

I'd like to run Companion Dashboard in a non-GUI/server-like environment (Bitfocus Companion provides a headless launcher that works well) and control/view/customize it over LAN via the web server.

The web server defaults to port 80 always, and isn't saved/loaded from a saved configuration. Running Companion Dashboard as a non-root user means that the server will be blocked from opening port 80 and an error will show, but the UI state appears to indicate that the server is running.

Running npm run dev actually starts a local server that I can access, but that's the Vite dev server and I don't want to use it in production (localhost:5173). Also, pretty sure any changes made via /control aren't pushed to the other instances (tested dirtily by opening in two tabs).

Run npm run build and then npm run preview, I can try to open the web server @ localhost:4173 but the "Connection Lost, attempting to reconnect" message is persistent. The page loads to display that message, so the web server is running at least that far.

I couldn't find a way to fix it on my own, but if you'd like to point me at where to start, I'm happy to take a crack at it if this isn't a priority for you.

Cheers! 😁

[tomhillmeyer]

Hi @bost-ty!

So I do see that the web server port is NOT included in the configuration file that Dashboard generates, so I will definitely be adding that. An oversight on my end!

The default being port 80 is mostly for a use-case in which someone installs Dashboard to run headless on something like a Raspberry Pi, where you'd drop it on the network and just need to navigate to the IP address or dashboard.local to access it.

But yes, I could see instances where you need it to default to a different port. I'll definitely add the web server port to the configuration file export, and I think what I'll do is look at a way of manually inserting/applying that configuration file into the app/install. That way you can pre-load a Dashboard instance before it's launched for the first time, which would give you control over which port it will default to. I will also make sure to include in the configuration file if the web server should be turned on by default.

It would make sense that the dev server works for you since it's decidedly not port 80. It also makes sense that if you're running on a dev server that changes wouldn't propagate across pages, as the dev server is simply serving the app without Electron's integrated web server, which is where /control and /display are actually looking for changes.

[bost-ty]

Hey Tom, saw your reply on mobile but forgot to reply. Thanks for the update. All of that tracks with me, makes sense.

I asked about running w/o the Electron application to see if I could run this on a low-powered non-RPi device running a non-Debian distro.

The port error throws in the Electron app when it isn't run as root in that situation, not sure if that happens when run headless on an RPi via the dpkg.

Also, perhaps unrelated, but the Electron build commands in package.json don't work because the commands expect some packages to be installed globally (electron-builder). Took me a second to figure that out, so might be work documenting those expectations for people like me who aren't as familiar w/ building Electron, or using npx electron-build in the command which will use the local package, global package, or download and invoke the package if needed.