Update… 30 full days since my last post about stability and have not experienced a single crash on either mirror. So, Electron is definitely the source of the problem.
Thank you to @sdetweil for the assistance in swapping over to Chromium and getting things to a stable state.
@cowboysdude I agree that most are quick to say “do this for me” and seldom say “how can I help you get this changed?” When you’re dealing with commercial products, that approach is expected because the source is closed. But, this is open-source and community-developed. We all have the ability to contribute -something-…
@raf So, figure out what’s incorrect and help get it updated. The doc you’re trying to work from was built in that same way at one point…
@raf Are you volunteering? :)
Seriously - You won’t be anywhere near as well-versed as if you can figure it out on your own. And documenting your learnings to help others is how all of this stuff grows and improves. I’ve pestered @sdetweil plenty about a lot - much of his input has been to help me understand where to look, but he has also done some coding and such on his side. I’ve offered back some things I learned along the way that he has then incorporated and I’m now going to look into helping to extend and enhance some work he has done by doing the coding myself. It take a village, as they say…
@sdetweil said in new update/upgrade script, ready for testing:
Where’s a good place to discuss the scripts? I’m wondering how feasible and useful it might be to add to the upgrade-script.sh one.
A couple of quick questions…
The “UpdateNotification” module is able to detect that there is a new version of MM available. Is this logged somewhere or easily accessible from the command line? I’m interested in writing a script that can assess the new version, possibly run a ‘test upgrade’ and then send me a IFTTT or pushover notification that a new version is available and an upgrade test succeeded (or failed).
Is the new upgrade script bundled with MM yet? I thought that was the intent, but did not see it up through 2.10.x
@sdetweil v10 is out and listed as “stable”.
@sdetweil I can appreciate that - I work for a software company, and know about inter-dependencies and the headaches they can cause.
MM is, in a very basic sense, a web server. Electron is a web browser. There shouldn’t be inter-dependencies between a web server and browser, and that seems to be apparent with Chromium not having an issue running against the MM server. So, I would hope that Electron could be brought forward or at least Chromium be documented as an solid alternative.
UPDATE: At this point, I’m closing in on a full week of operating two mirrors without issue. I’ve changed to running Chromium instead of Electron and it’s working well all around. Here are some details of the operation in case it’s useful:
Prior to successfully switching over to Chromium, the devices would crash at least once every other day (at least one of them would crash during a 48 hour window), although it was much more common to see each one crash multiple times per day. There was no consistency to which one would crash, why, when, etc. The “crash” in question was a black screen on the mirror and no visible info being output although the mouse cursor would sometimes appear. I wrote a cron job that would run every five minutes, look up the location of the pm2 error logs, check to see if there was an “out of memory” error in the log, and do a restart of MM if there was (the restart consisted of shut down, log flush, and start). This job ran every five minutes and would silently exit if there was no error as the mirror was running ok.
Since the switchover, I have seen zero crashes on either device in almost seven days of operation.
Electron has been discussed ad nauseum as having a variety of shortcomings, bugs, issues, etc. - especially in the old version being used with MM. At this point, I have to wonder why it’s still not only the default but the ‘only’ browser that’s really discussed for use with MM. It would seem that it’s time to either forklift an upgrade to it within MM or switch to something else (at a minimum, at least provide a well-documented alternative).
I’m grateful to @sdetweil for his assistance with this, especially since it really took a calendar year almost to get to a point where it’s seemingly working as expected now.
I’m now about 2.5 days into two MM’s running without crashes using Chromium instead of Electron. I’ve also not seen a return of the pop up from Chromium about needing to be updated.
For those that might need to correct the update issue, here’ s what I did on my mirrors:
sudo touch /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/01-disable-update-check;echo CHROMIUM_FLAGS=\"\$\{CHROMIUM_FLAGS\} --check-for-update-interval=31536000\" | sudo tee /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/01-disable-update-check
Can anyone explain why the Free API from OpenWeatherMap shows 7 Day Forecast but the discussion here (and what I actually see) is only being able to retrieve 5 days?
In looking at the documentation from the weather site, it appears that the URL should be constructed differently than how this weather module is building it out. Specifically, the URL should be something like:
https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/onecall?lat={lat}&lon={lon}&exclude={part}&appid={API key}
But the URL is -actually- being built as:
https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?id={id}&appid={API key}
It seems that the URL needs be different?
You can’t make this stuff up…
Mirror has been running for a couple of hours now without crashing as it has been doing intermittently in the past. However, there is now a “pop up” on the screen stating that Chromium couldn’t be updated and that I’m missing out on features and fixes.
I found what might be a fix in the way of potentially “configuring” Chromium to ignore updates, but I won’t know if this truly works until probably tomorrow at the earliest.
I simply opened the github page, copied the link, and used wget to download it to the mirror. So, it’s entirely possible that the way I downloaded it was partly to blame. Figured I would mention it because I’m likely not the only one that might run into this, and at a minimum it could become a troubleshooting step if others run into issues.
Based on the directions you gave in this thread, the run-start.sh script won’t work. I didn’t take the time to look through the github content to see if this is covered there, but you have to do
chmod +x run-start.sh
Or the script won’t actually execute. Based on old habits, I was executing the chmod statement without even thinking about it. But, after downloading the newest script, I purposefully left it untouched and it wouldn’t run.
Cool. I download the latest one and try it out.
Glad I can help you keep improving your code! lol
One tweak to the run-start.sh script seems to have fixed it. I changed this line:
serveronly=$(grep -v '^[[:blank:]]*//' config/config.js | grep -i serveronly: | awk '{print tolower($2)}' | tr -d ,\"\'\\r)
To this:
serveronly=$(grep -v '^[[:blank:]]*//' config/config.js | grep -i serveronly: | awk '{print tolower($1)}' | tr -d ,\"\'\\r)
The awk command seems to have been looking for a variable that wasn’t being passed and by changing the variable number that it was looking for, it no longer starts electron and now starts chromium.
Welp…
No change. System still crashes on the Pi using Chromium.
In looking at the most recent core file, it’s still showing that electron is what’s faulting.
There are no running processes of chromium and electron is still being started. Something is amiss with the configuration to where your run-start.sh script is either not being called or is not launching the correct browser for some reason.
I’ve made no changes to run-start.sh, I’ve edited package.json so that this line is gone:
"start": "DISPLAY=\"${DISPLAY:=:0}\" ./node_modules/.bin/electron js/electron.js",
And has been replaced with this one:
"start": "./run-start.sh",
config/config.js has the following setting:
var config = {
address: "0.0.0.0", // Address to listen on, can be:
// - "localhost", "127.0.0.1", "::1" to listen on loopback interfac
e
// - another specific IPv4/6 to listen on a specific interface
// - "0.0.0.0", "::" to listen on any interface
// Default, when address config is left out or empty, is "localhost
"
port: 8080,
basePath: "/", // The URL path where MagicMirror is hosted. If you are using a Reverse proxy
// you must set the sub path here. basePath must end with a /
ipWhitelist: ["127.0.0.1", "192.168.192.0/24", "::1"], // Set [] to allow all IP addresses
//
or add a specific IPv4 of 192.168.1.5 :
//
["127.0.0.1", "::ffff:127.0.0.1", "::1", "::ffff:192.168.1.5"],
//
or IPv4 range of 192.168.3.0 --> 192.168.3.15 use CIDR format :
//
["127.0.0.1", "::ffff:127.0.0.1", "::1", "::ffff:192.168.3.0/28"],
useHttps: false, // Support HTTPS or not, default "false" will use HTTP
httpsPrivateKey: "", // HTTPS private key path, only require when useHttps is true
httpsCertificate: "", // HTTPS Certificate path, only require when useHttps is true
language: "en",
logLevel: ["INFO", "LOG", "WARN", "ERROR"],
timeFormat: 24,
units: "metric",
// serverOnly: true/false/"local" ,
serverOnly:"local",
Good info.
I’m interested to see how for the MM will make it now using Chromium instead of Electron. Since I have two with the same setup, I’ll set both to use Chromium for an additional level of testing it out.
Why was Electron chosen as the browser up to this point? And, what potential downsides are there to Chromium?
I’ve made the change to Chromium - we’ll see how that does going forward.
I do recall reading plenty about the severe lag of Electron in terms of the version that’s part of MM, so that part wasn’t “news” really. What I genuinely don’t understand is why this specific, basic configuration continues to have issues for me while Electron mostly does what it needs to do for so many others without creating this sort of problem.
I have confirmed that only Electron crashes on the Pi itself. The MM server does not experience any hiccups and remote browser connections remain functional.
I at least now understand WHAT is crashing. Next steps might be to figure out WHY it’s crashing and potentially remedy it.