Quickstart does not work

[pankalog]

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to get openBalena up and running for a couple of days to no avail.

Here is what I have been able to deduce from many different issues/forum posts so far:

• There is absolutely no support for ARM-based systems, and openBalena only works with x86-based systems. This would be useful as more servers and personal devices are running ARM.
• The getting started guide refers to using Ubuntu 18.04, which has entered EOL past May, and a lot of members seem to still be using 18.04.
• To get openBalena up and running, your Linux machine needs to be using cgroup v1, something which is never mentioned. To get cgroupv1 for your system, you will probably need to edit your GRUB command, which can be a difficult task for managed instances.
• If you get all the containers to startup correctly, the current versions of containers (found in ./compose/versions) DO NOT work with the latest balena-cli release. Read more here.
• You cannot simply change a version of one of the containers, while having some sort of guarantee that the stack will function.
• To get any sort of logs from any of the services, you need to use ./scripts/compose exec <service-name> journalctl -fn100 . This makes it difficult to monitor the entire stack using 1 command, and concurrently.

Hence, using the above, I set out to figure out how to deploy openBalena on an x86, Ubuntu 22.04, managed VPS.

• I first edited the GRUB configuration to allow cgroupv1: systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0, update-grub, reboot
• Of course download all the required packages and make the balena user, add the user to groups sudo and docker.
• git clone https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena.git
• cd open-balena/
• ./scripts/quickstart -U <email@address> -P <password> (assume we are trying to install openBalena locally)
• ./scripts/compose up -d

With the containers now being up and running (assuming balena-cli installed):

• Install the self-signed certificate
• Change the hostname on ~/.balenarc.yml (openbalena.local in my case)
• export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=/home/balena/open-balena/config/certs/root/ca.crt

balena login reports cannot get /actor/v1/whoami, which is the error that I pointed to above. Unfortunately using older versions of balena-cli is not a solution for me.

I tried using multiple different compose/versions files that people have recommended/opened PRs for, with none of them working.

I tried using open-balena-helm, with no success (I will admit I have never been tasked with using k8s/helm before).

Can someone tell me exactly how I can get this project to run on my x86, cgroupv1, Ubuntu 22.04 server?

Ideally, the open-balena-api version should be as close to latest as possible, to support the most recent devices (I for example need to be able to use Raspberry Pis with my openBalena deployment).

I hope this can also be an issue that can point users to the correct direction. Specifically, if anyone has a 100%-working compose/versions file I'd be eternally grateful.

I'm looking forward to your responses!

[ab77]

Hello, could you please try the new guide here..