Project Status: No Longer Under Active Development

This project was an experiment to integrate WPE into the Balena Hub.
It is not currently actively developed or maintained. The current version available from Balena Hub does not reflect the most recent advancements or patches in the WPE ecosystem.

If an up to date Balena block is very important to you, we'd be very interested to hear more. Meanwhile, if you encounter issues or are seeking updates, we recommend exploring alternative solutions or resources that align with your requirements.

Should you have any further questions or inquiries, please feel free to get in touch.

It provides a Web based screen display running on WPE WebKit. Contrary to other solutions, this project runs the browser on the top of a Wayland compositor (Weston).

WPE WebKit allows embedders to create simple and performant systems based on Web platform technologies. It is a WebKit port designed with flexibility and hardware acceleration in mind, leveraging common 3D graphics APIs for best performance.

version: '2'

volumes:
    pulse:                          # Required for PA over UNIX socket
    weston:

services:
  audio:
    image: balenablocks/audio
    privileged: true
    volumes:
      - 'pulse:/run/pulse'

  weston:
    restart: always
    image: igalia/balena-weston
    privileged: true
    volumes:
      - 'weston:/run/weston'

  wpe:
    restart: always
    build: ./wpe
    privileged: true
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
      - 12321:12321
    volumes:
      - 'weston:/run/weston'
      - 'pulse:/run/pulse'

• Install depends (Debian based OS):

  sudo scripts/install-fetch-depends.sh
  sudo scripts/install-build-depends.sh
  sudo scripts/install-push-depends.sh

• Getting the sources:

  git clone https://github.com/Igalia/balena-browser-wpe.git
  repo init -u https://github.com/Igalia/balena-browser-wpe.git -m manifest-honister.xml -b main
  repo sync --force-sync

• Generating the image root filesystem with Yocto:

  MACHINE=raspberrypi3
  ./build.sh

• Pushing the image to the registered Docker repository:

  MACHINE=raspberrypi3
  IMAGE_DOCKER_PATH=igalia
  # BALENA_BUILD_EXTRA_ARGS="-e"  # In case of balena is being executed on a different host architecture than the balena machine target
  ./push.sh

The URL displayed by the browser launcher can be set using the WPE_URL environment variable. The default value is wpewebkit.org

balena-wpe ships with tohora so which provides a web interface for changing target URLs at runtime on port 8080.

If you want your device to display content even without internet, you can add your content in the docker image and point the browser to them. Append a similar Dockerfile fragment to your project:

COPY public_html /var/lib/public_html

ENV WPE_URL="file:///var/lib/public_html/index.html"

A lot of the configuration of this project is about setting up config.txt. The way you do this on balena is by setting some special fleet configuration variables.

How to set the config.txt is pretty well documented in the RaspberryPi official documentation. You can overwrite these settings in the balena dashboard setting variables in your environment using this prefix RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_. Read more.

Probably you will be interested in to set the GPU memory to a more suitable value for hardware accelerated graphics.

By setting WPE_ENABLE_INSPECTOR_SERVER to on you can connect to the Web browser inspector server in remote loading the following URL inspector://<raspberrypi IP>:12321 in an Epiphany Browser.

Alternatively you can use docker-libwebkit2gtk to use the remote Web Inspector.

export URL="inspector://<your raspberrypi IP>:12321"
export XAUTHORITY="/run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority"  # or "xhost +"

cd docker-libwebkit2gtk
sudo -E ./run.sh
URL: inspector://192.168.1.170:12321
Sending build context to Docker daemon  81.92kB
...
Opening URL: inspector://192.168.1.170:12321

balena-wpe relies on balena-audio for the audio processing. Check the specific settings of this block for audio settings.

Alternatively the block can be also configured to route the audio through other Pulser Server by setting the PULSE_SERVER environment variable.