[Beginner] TrueNAS Scale + Apps (Node-Red)

[mhalak]

Hi everyone,

so I just dove into TrueNAS waters and, although I investigated as much as I could before, there are lots of questions popping up when you try to do it in person.

As this is my first post please forgive me if I forget to put some mandatory information here. I will try to add whatever is necessary as we go as this is my personal learning project and there are no secrets here.

so a little bit of backstory... I installed TrueNAS Scale on my Dell R620 and now I have come to the phase where I'm installing apps. I also added TrueCarts for a larger app catalogue. The goal of this learning project is to have my smart house (home assistant + AppDaemon automation) moved to TrueNAS and learn something new maybe even solve some design problems along the way. So long story short my wife will probably kill me in a period of the next few months because of the ever-present problem with lights and the non-responding house.

Now to the actual problem...
I wanted to try out Node-red (available in TrueCharts) so went for the install button but here is where the problems start and I think I can map it to a single root cause (configuration persistency). So my "investigation" told me that "Host path" is the best choice and I tried it to configure but failed to do so because of what looks to me as missing options. Google resulted with absolutely no answers so this tells me either I'm doing something wrong no one else did or my noob level is so damn high I can't even ask the right questions...

• If I choose "Host Path" for the configuration I'm missing the "mount path" option so I'm not sure what TrueNAS does in this case but it is not good as an app (or pod or whatever is the correct term) fails to start with EACCESS and message that .json file cannot be copied to /data location (at this moment I think this is an internal location for persistent data of an app). An interesting fact is that if go for the "Additional App Storage" I see this option but configuring this in addition to the main "App Config Storage" option does not result in the working configuration as well. I cannot skip the main option and do only "Additional". Also to add I tried with and without "Automatic Permissions" as this was the first thing I thought was the answer to this problem.

• The second thing I tried that sort of works but has its own problems is to choose the "PVC" option which is great for quick starting up as it requires no additional configuration and it just works. The problem with this option is that all the storage in the app is completely invisible to me from the outside which means...
  • [non-Node-red explanation] ... if I fail spectacularly...
  • [Node-red explanation] ... if I do something like add a function node with some corrupted code which was immediately the first thing I did... and second... and third results with what I think is restarting the app and getting stuck at the "Deploying" state. I'm doing lots of this as I'm currently trying to figure out what framework lets me do and what not. Logs clearly show that my function has a problem which I guess blocks the app from starting...

... I suppose the next step would be to access persistent storage and clear flow configuration containing this function for the app to start again but with the PVC option, this is not possible as the shell is not available because the app is not running. Currently what I do is delete the app and install it again and set up everything inside the node-red.. again. I did it more than 10 times already so I thought no better time to seek for professional help.​

Now at this moment, I have lots of questions regarding either TrueNAS and Node-red but the main ones at this moment are:

• [TrueNAS] why do I see different options from app to app during the install steps? For some apps, it was possible to set up only extra host paths (and there it was called extra and not additional) which I could map to the correct internal path which could be the reason why they worked and this one did not.
• [Node-red] (I know this is maybe not a question for this forum but it has to do with TrueNAS-Node red interaction...) Is it possible that in case I create some problematic changes in flow it results in an immediate crash/restart of the app which can be recovered only by manually going through the files and removing problems with nano/vi/vim? Not really a developer-enabling environment for quite a popular automation framework...

At this moment I am almost 100% sure it's my problem but it could be great if someone could point me in the right direction or even answer some questions I have

Thanks in advance.

 

[morganL]

Each App is uniquely defined by its Helm Chart and will have different options.

If the issue is only one App, you should also Try TrueCharts discord channel for their App... that is where their Apps are maintained/supported.

 

[mhalak]

Each App is uniquely defined by its Helm Chart and will have different options.

If the issue is only one App, you should also Try TrueCharts discord channel for their App... that is where their Apps are maintained/supported.

Thanks, this fills some of the information hole I'm having.

I'll try other forums as well.