Tips

Editing configuration and routine files

Often, whilst testing or getting set up, you’ll want to edit files on a device itself, particularly a configuration or routine file that you’re just trying out.

For this, the nano editor has been installed in the built containers so you can do:

$ nano $GATEWAY_ROUTINE_FILE

or

$ nano $GATEWAY_CONFIG_FILE

to edit either the routine or the configuration files.

SCP of files to/from BalenaOS

For 99% of the time, using nano to edit (or paste from your own preferred IDE) will be fine. Occasionally though, you’ll want to get files on/off a device. In particular, for debugging, you might run the gateway with the -l and/or --save-local-logs options, then want to directly inspect the data files that result.

However, the balena cli doesn’t support scp that well out of the box (although there are workarounds using tunneling).

To copy files between /data directory (on a container deployed by Balena) and your own machine:

  1. Install the balena CLI and do balena login

  2. Add your public ssh key to BalenaCloud and make sure you can use balena ssh correctly, following these instructions

  3. Check this GitHub issue. If closed with a new balena CLI feature, then follow those instructions instead. Otherwise use the following workaround.

  4. Install the ssh-uuid utility.

  5. Get the full UUID of the device:

$ balena devices
ID      UUID    DEVICE NAME   DEVICE TYPE     FLEET              STATUS IS ONLINE SUPERVISOR VERSION OS VERSION       DASHBOARD URL
7294376 4bfe19d fried-firefly raspberrypi4-64 aerosense/gateways Idle   true      13.1.11            balenaOS 2.98.33 https://dashboard.balena-cloud.com/devices/4bfe19d3651d27dc89d4b1a8c95061fa/summary

$ balena device 4bfe19d
== FRIED FIREFLY
ID:                    7294376
...
UUID:                  4bfe19d3651d27dc89d4b1a8c95061fa
...

  1. Get the App ID (which is actually the Fleet ID), in this case 1945598:

balena fleets
ID      NAME                SLUG                          DEVICE TYPE         ONLINE DEVICES DEVICE COUNT
1945598 gateways            aerosense/gateways            raspberrypi4-64     1              3

  1. We’ll be copying from balena’s Host OS, not from the container. The /data directory isn’t mounted in the same place as when you’re inside the container. So the root of the data folder is:

/var/lib/docker/volumes/<APP ID>_resin-data/_data/

  1. So for example, to copy a file from within the /data folder from remote to local, we do:

scp-uuid 4bfe19d3651d27dc89d4b1a8c95061fa.balena:/var/lib/docker/volumes/1945598_resin-data/_data/gateway/20221122T100229/window-2.json .

  1. The scp command should work recursively with folders, but take care because they can be large if a long session has taken place.