balena-electron's Introduction

Balena Electron Example

This is a very simple, barebones example of how to get an electron app running on balena. It is split out into two parts.

One piece is your application (this repo) that installs all dependencies for Electron to be able to run.
- This example app has an express server, and starts a window in kiosk mode.
The second piece is the xserver block, which starts up an X11 server that your application will use to display on.
- You can see all the environment variables to configure xserver here

Example `docker-compose.yml`

version: '2.1'
volumes:
    # we create a shared volume so that the xserver can mount its socket file, and our application container will be able to use it to display
    xserver-volume:
services:
  xserver:
    image: balenablocks/xserver
    restart: always
    privileged: true
    volumes:
      # when we start, a UNIX socket is mounted in this directory, for communication to the X server
      - 'xserver-volume:/tmp/.X11-unix'
  balena-electron:
    build: .
    restart: always
    network_mode: host
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    volumes:
      # We will have access to the UNIX socket shared by xserver after it has started up.
      - 'xserver-volume:/tmp/.X11-unix'
    environment:
      # We need to specify which display we want to use for the X server. :0 is the first display that we have plugged in. This because there is no default display specified.
      - DISPLAY=:0

Build for multiple architectures

There is an example script in this repo which uses docker buildx to build and push mutliple architecture images, along with the manifest to a docker repo. See build-images.sh for the details.

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