General Mucking Around with MM

ruff.hi

I am still researching about raspberry pi and magic mirror. I want to go the whole hog … but while I wait for Mr Bank to agree, I am playing with a 7" touch screen after watching this youtube vid. It is as cute as pie. I have a working knowledge of SSH (I have a freeNAS server downstairs) and the like … but mm is all new to me. I have finally settled on a way to edit the config …

Copy config to my network
edit file there
insert edited config into pi via ftp
restart mm via ssh

sdetweil

@ruff-hi get the winscp or bitvise ssh clients, gives u a file manager view over the files on the pi

double click to edit and save

if the changes are css , then on mirror press ctrl-r to reload the page
or restart if U set the consfig to
address:“0.0.0.0”,
ipWhitelist:[],
then any machine i your house can access the MM…
then u can use chrome on your pc to view changes too (ctrl-r to reload)

ruff.hi

@sdetweil … thanks for the tip re alternate ssh clients. I will look at that.

I still need to work out the ipWhitelist thing … but it sounds like I can peek at my mm from any networked pc in the house. Does that include a mac?

Edit: Got ipwhitelist to work and both wife and I can see the mm from any location inside my network.

sdetweil

@ruff-hi yeh, you can add specific addresses if u want to allow only some, or exclude… all kinds of filtering

first u gotta GET on you network, THEN find some ip address THEN find some port…
THEN u gotta find a hack way INSIDE that box… seems like a lotta work for not much typical value…
I don’t have any passwords used on my MM…

BKeyport

What I did was to simlink my config.js and custom.css files so I could have them in one directory, and used samba so I could share that directory to windows for editing.

sdetweil

@BKeyport another cool idea!
I got 7 machines running all the time

BKeyport

@sdetweil bonus, with a bit of trickery, I’ve got that directory backing up as needed to GitHub under a private git. 😃

retroflex

For example if you use this for SSH:
https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

…you can edit config files etc. on another machine and when you save it asks if you want to upload back to rpi.

ruff.hi

Thx all - lots of interesting suggestions to play around with.

I detached the 7" screen from the RPI and now mm won’t start.

0|mm       | (electron:30477): Gtk-WARNING **: 06:02:18.928: cannot open display: :0
0|mm       | npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
0|mm       | npm ERR! errno 1
0|mm       | npm ERR! magicmirror@2.13.0 start: `DISPLAY="${DISPLAY:=:0}" ./node_modules/.bin/electron js/electron.js`
0|mm       | npm ERR! Exit status 1
0|mm       | npm ERR!
0|mm       | npm ERR! Failed at the magicmirror@2.13.0 start script.
0|mm       | npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.
0|mm       |
0|mm       | npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
0|mm       | npm ERR!     /home/pi/.npm/_logs/2020-10-24T10_02_18_961Z-debug.log

Is this something about having to start the magicmirror in server mode?

ruff.hi

google to the rescue … must remember to google the actual error message and not what you think the problem is.

I googled “rpi magic mirror cannot open display” and it displayed some posts about this very issue … one of them contained this suggestion …

Ok, there might be a problem with your electron installation.
Can you go into your MagicMirror folder and type “node serveronly”?

Then, go back to your browser window and type in “localhost:8080”

Jump over to the mm folder, mistype ‘note serveronly’ and then ‘node serveronly’ … and my mm is back :)

how to I make node serveronly permanent? Embed it in the mm.sh start script?

Edit: answer: that worked on reboot.

mm.sh now contains …

cd ./MagicMirror
DISPLAY=:0 npm start
node serveronly