Make it easier to open node-red (get rid of :1880)

[mpvader]

The goal is to host it under http://venus.local/node-red, or redirect from-, rather than http://venus.local:1880/.

Hosting might be hard to do because you then also need to proxy websockets. If hard; then never mind; and do a redirect or something else.

If easy; then nice.

[tkurki]

Hiawatha has ws support.

[pkronstrom]

Alrighty, the following changes are needed to get it working.

1. Create a config file for Hiawatha in /etc/hiawatha/sites-enabled/node-red.conf. Add the following line ReverseProxy ^/node-red http://127.0.0.1:1880/ Keep-Alive. Restart Hiawatha /etc/init.d/hiawatha restart

2. Add the following line to /home/root/.node-red/settings.js: httpRoot: '/node-red'.

3. Change this row to accommodate the httpAdminRoot property in settings.js. I'll commit this change to the master soon.

   const serviceRoot = (RED.settings.httpNodeRoot || RED.settings.httpAdminRoot || "").replace(/\/$/,"") + '/victron/services/';

This works, but occasionally I've been getting some lag spikes in node-red websocket data. I'll keep testing it a bit.

[pkronstrom]

3. Change this row to accommodate the httpAdminRoot property in settings.js. I'll commit this change to the master soon.

This is now included in https://github.com/victronenergy/node-red-contrib-victron/commit/e7326b3c64b7dcf0e884557232a08a3e1c24c5f0

[pkronstrom]

I'm not convinced that the reverse-proxy will work without hiccups. Occasionally the whole Node-RED UI freezes and reloading it takes ages -- usually when a lot of requests are triggered simualtenously (e.g. repeatedly triggering an inject node).

This was discussed with Matthijs, let's do a redirect instead.

[pkronstrom]

Hiawatha can't be used to redirect to port when the exact IP isn't known (see Hugo's answer here). This answer is 10 years old, though.

A simple workaround serves a php script that redirects from /nodered to :1880/nodered. httpRootneeds to be set in settings.js for this to work.

~/.node-red/settings.js

httpRoot: '/nodered',

/var/www/venus/nodered/redirect.php

<?php
    // redirects /nodered to <ip>:1880/nodered
    $port = '1880';
    header('Location: '
        . ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] ? 'https' : 'http')
        . '://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . ':' . $port
        . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
    exit;
?>

/etc/hiawatha/sites-enabled/nodered.conf

UrlToolkit {
    ToolkitID = rewrite
    Match ^/nodered/(.*) Rewrite /nodered/redirect.php
}

UseToolkit = rewrite

[dirkjanfaber]

Having 2 urls (with and without adding 1880) to open node-red instead of just one probably confuses more than it solves.

The Proxy solution would have been nice, but that still gives some strange hickups (just tested). So we won't add the functionality to Venus for now. Closing this issue.