Development devices

Tunneling to a development device

In order to make it easier to debug and do QA testing on a feature or a release, it's helpful to expose the virtual device's services. We can use tailscale for that.

SSH into the virtual Balena device using the UUID which can be obtained from the Balena dashboard:

balena ssh <uuid>

Within the virtual Balena environment, run:

balena run -d \
    --name=tailscaled \
    --restart always \
    -e TS_STATE_DIR=/var/lib/tailscale \
    -v tailscale-state:/var/lib/tailscale \
    -v /dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun \
    --network=host \
    --privileged \
    tailscale/tailscale tailscaled

And to start the tailscale service, run:

balena exec tailscaled tailscale up --advertise-routes=10.0.3.0/24 --accept-routes --reset

The Tailscale container will provide you a URL to access that adds the device to your Tailscale account.

Then enable the subnets from your Tailscale admin panel to be able to use all the devices locally through the IP addresses they are assigned by Balena Virt.

On your own machine run:

docker run -d \
    --name=tailscaled \
    --restart always \
    -e TS_STATE_DIR=/var/lib/tailscale \
    -v tailscale-state:/var/lib/tailscale \
    -v /dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun \
    --network=host \
    --privileged \
    tailscale/tailscale tailscaled

And to start tailscale:

docker exec tailscaled tailscale up --advertise-routes=10.0.3.0/24 --accept-routes --reset

Don't forget to also enable the subnets. And now on your machine you should be able to access services on the balena device's ip.

Using remote device

In order for Terrastories and the offline map on both Terrastories and Observations Map to work remotely you'll need to set the device's variables to use the tunneled ip:

• HOST_HOSTNAME ex.: 100.96.14.113

• OFFLINE_MAP_STYLE ex.: http://100.96.14.113:8085/styles/terrastories-map/style.json

Setting up a virtual-machine

Read details on the official repository.

Make sure you have a Balena Fleet with generic x86_64 (GPT) as the Default device type.

On a Digital Ocean droplet with at least 25Gbs of storage and 1Gb of ram, and latest Docker pre-installed, run:

docker run -it \
    -d \
    --restart always \
    -v bv_pid:/app/pid \
    --device=/dev/kvm \
    --cap-add=net_admin \
    -e API_TOKEN="your_balena_token" \
    -e FLEET="your_balena_fleet" \
    -e MEM=1024M \
    -e DISK=20G \
    -e DEV_MODE=true \
    --network host \
    ghcr.io/balena-labs-research/balena-virt:latest

After a few seconds a new device should appear on your amd64 and should start updating itself with latest release for the Fleet.