Open source helper for openbalena, a platform to deploy and manage connected devices.
The goal of this project is to implement endpoints that are not part of open-balena-api but which are helpful to piece together complete functionality of open-balena. For example, the /v6/supervisor_release endpoint, which returns the correct supervisor version for a given device based on its architecture and is necessary to allow devices to automatically update their supervisors using the update-balena-supervisor service included with balenaos, and the /download endpoint, which allows for OS downloads provided the OS was built using the balena-yocto-scripts infrastructure. This package will likely expand over time as new endpoints are added, updated or removed from the open-balena-api project.
This project is compatible with open-balena and specifically relies on the open-balena-api and open-balena-s3 components.
open-balena-helper is meant to be installed as part of open-balena, and ideally at the same time. For thoes running open-balena on k8s, we have included services to build it in the open-balena helm project. If you are running open-balena via docker-compose, you will need to modify the scripts to mirror the setup in the helm charts or recreate it using the configuration steps below.
To configure open-balena-helper you must define four environment variables and two volumes for the container:
Environment Variables:
- API_HOST:
open-balena-apihostmame, i.e. api.openbalena.<yourdomain.com> - IMAGE_STORAGE_ENDPOINT:
open-balena-s3hostmame, i.e. s3.openbalena.<yourdomain.com> - IMAGE_STORAGE_BUCKET: The bucket name where OS images are stored, i.e. "image-data"
- IMAGE_STORAGE_PREFIX: The prefix within the above noted bucket where OS images are stored, i.e. "images"
- IMAGE_STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY: The access key for your
open-balena-s3instance - IMAGE_STORAGE_SECRET_KEY: The secret key for your
open-balena-s3instance - IMAGE_STORAGE_FORCE_PATH_STYLE: You probably want this set to "true"
Proxy Configuration:
You will also need to update your haproxy instance to redirect the following URLs (which would normally route to the open-balena-api container) to the open-balena-helper container:
- api.openbalena.<yourdomain.com>/v6/supervisor_release
- api.openbalena.<yourdomain.com>/download
Alternatively, if you are using the helm project noted above for deploying your openbalena instance, these redirects will be handled for you.
Once installed, your devices should automatically take supervisor updates via the update-balena-supervisor service, and you should be able to download custom os builds using the balena os download <your-device-type> -o ./os-image.img
- Likely many; needs more testing to cover off corner cases
- Credit to the Balena team for developing open-balena-api and balena-cli, which provide a versatile framework to manage fleets of connected devices