Dashboard UI to a custom web server

[Ekrem03]

Hello,

Could somebody direct me to read&learn how to link dashboard ui to an internet site. I am using beaglebone green wireless.

From http://192.168.7.2:1880/ui I could see the output of the beaglebone. How exactly can I change the web address to my internet site? 

Thanks!!

[Julian Knight]

Not clear what ou mean I'm afraid.

Do you want to a a simple URL link for an external site to a Dashboard page? Or do you want to embed that site into Dashboard (iframe) to make it appear as wrapped by the Dashboard?

[Ekrem03]

Thanks Julian for the response . 

Let me tell you what I am trying to accomplish: I have beaglebone green wireless (bbgw) to sense from 7 different sensors. I read these sensors in Node-red. By using dashboard I print the sensed values and  also show them on gauges. I can connect to bbgw and see the dashboard interface at http://192.168.7.2:1880/ui link locally. This works just fine. Now, I want to go to an internet site e.g. www.xyz.com and hit a link on that site to reach the same interface from anywhere e.g. home, office another city.  I hope this is more clear.  This falls I guess into your first question: "Do you want to a a simple URL link for an external site to a Dashboard page? "

[Julian Knight]

OK. This is partly straight-forward and partly fairly risky.

It is risky because, as you know, connecting anything to the Internet is a risk. So you will want (trust me, you really will!) to take some precautions. 

The rest is fairly straight-forward.

There is a write-up for the Node-RED cookbook that is in preparation, the notes for it on the WIKI may be of use: https://github.com/node-red/cookbook.nodered.org/wiki/How-to-safely-expose-Node-RED-to-the-Internet

[Ekrem03]

Thanks for the link and the write up was very useful for a starter.

It looks like ngrok is a good tool for a quick start and I am going for it. But to be honest, I feel uncomfortable to share all my data with someone else even if they say they don't look what's in it. 

[Julian Knight]

Thanks. re ngrok, I have to agree, I think they are probably safe for anything "casual" and they are widely used so issues tend to surface eventually with services like that and I'm not aware of any issues. But I probably wouldn't trust them for something really critical.

But there are lots of ways to create a connection yourself, they are just a bit more of a faff to set up. If you are just needing access for yourself and are comfortable with configuring your router, using PUTTY (or a similar SSH client) to connect to your Pi using SSH allows you to create one or more encrypted "tunnels" for IP traffic. This is fairly easy to set up and very secure as long as your SSH is configured securely and has a reasonably strong password. You can save yourself some hassle by not using the default port 22 externally to the Internet, use something like 2222 instead, you can do this using port address translation in your router or by changing the Pi's SSH configuration. It stops your logs being filled by automated bot attacks.

If you need to make your interface more open, you will need to think carefully about what is exposed and what impact it would have if someone was able to intercept the traffic or even send commands to your system. Best to use a reverse proxy to handle the security (both encryption and authentication), something like NGINX, just make sure you secure both https and wss (websocket) channels and restrict to those 2 protocols.