Clientonly mode vs just a browser

[artieikon]

I tried searching for a topic on the difference between running MM using clientonly mode vs just connecting to a server using a browser but I couldnt find anything on it.

Why would you need to run clientonly mode and have to install nodejs and deal with the potential issues that comes with having extra dependencies while you could just connect to a server using a browser?

Edit: I am not griping about splitting client and server into different parts, I think that is a great idea I just dont see the benefit of running clientonly mode when you already have an option of using a browser… unless the only difference is you choose to depend on nodejs vs depending on chrome

[sdetweil]

@artieikon i don’t know either. been pretty stable w chrome since I’ve been here these last 3 years.

maybe there was a time where the electron browser was better, maybe particularly on pi

looks like chromium was added to raspian in Jessie in 2016

[artieikon]

True stability might have been an issue at some point. Also maybe it was to support more use cases, more support is always better than less.
Both are light weight and easy to install/configure so I might just stick with browser for now and switch if I find any kind of issues (or if someone has a reason we missed).

[potts-mike]

I’m thinking about running client only configs on a couple pi zeros.

If I were to go with a browser only how would I configure it to launch and load full screen on start up?

[sdetweil]

@potts-mike install pm2, create a shell script to launch chromium and pass it the url

see the bottom of the run-start.sh I provide for pi0 for the command line syntax
script also provided here
https://github.com/sdetweil/MagicMirror_scripts

[artieikon]

@potts-mike pm2 seems like a bit overkill for just opening a browser.
If you are just using using the zero to show the browser (and are not running the code with clientonly mode) than you can just edit /home/USER/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart to launch chromium
See this stackoverflow post: Start “Chromium” automatically on booting the Pi3 with Raspbian JESSIE

[artieikon]

Hah well that didnt take long…
Chromium crashed on me a few times today with the classic “Aw, Snap!” page… but that might be more of an indication that I have an issue with one of the modules and not with how it is displayed. But as far as I know pm2 can be setup to auto-restart so if the “Aw, Snap!” page I’m seeing would cause the node process to crash, pm2 would auto-restart it.

tl;dr one difference between the two ways. Chromium doesnt auto-restart on crashes. pm2 would autorestart but might hide the underlying issues if you are not monitoring logs/restarts.