Designer used with headless servers?

I’d like to run OpenHAB on a headless server (a Raspberry PI in my attic).

So I thought I run OpenHAB Designer on my Mac, and upload the generated config files to my RPi. No luck, as Designer apparently checks for a fully-functional OpenHAB installation on the device it runs on, and refuses to open any directory I give it.

  1. Am I correct that the Designer is only supposed to be run on the actual OpenHAB server, thereby preventing headless servers? Is there some reason for that?

  2. What exactly is Designer checking for, and why? Can I fake that somehow? (Yes, I could nfs-mount the directory or stuff like that, or put 100MB of otherwise unused JARs on my Mac, but I’d rather not.)

  3. I would have checked the Designer source code, but I can’t find it. Where is it? (I grep’d github.com/openhab for the error message I got, but no match, what am I missing?)

Thanks,

Johannes.

No. I have designer installed on my windows machine and openhab on a raspberry pi. I have a samba share on the pi and access that share (read and write).

You need to select the /configuration folder and have an openhab_default.cfg (in addition to your openhab.cfg) present.

To elaborate on @sihui’s answer, Designer works with the entier configurations folder, not individual files. So you need to have an entire /etc/openhab/configurations/* folder on your Mac and point Designer at the configurations folder.

It needs this because it loads the contents of your .items files so it knows what you can reference in your rules and point out typos and the like when you refer to Item names, for one example.

What I used to do is run a git server and check in my files there, make my changes on my local machine, check them in, then git pull on my server to update the configs. But I found that edit/run loop to be too slow so now I either edit on the server (I’ve a VNC server running on it) or through a samba share.

The way I understand @j12t he has openhab on a pi and designer on a mac. So he should have the config folder on his pi … :sunglasses:

The use case he described is he wants to edit the files on his Mac using Designer and copy them over to the Pi. So he needs a full copy of the configurations folder on his Mac.

Then I misunderstood his question …

@rikoshak’s interpretation is right.

So the setup also involves samba … are mere mortals supposed to be able to set that up? :slight_smile:

Ok, I copied the configuration folder hierarchy to my Mac, and indeed Designer now opens it. Thanks for the help. Next question:

I can see that Designer knows something about the .items and .sitemap files. But many other files – .py, .xsl including openhab.cfg and users.cfg – open up in an external editor. Is that how it is supposed to be?

Yoru .cfg files should open in Designer. At least they do for me. I rarely use Macs so I wonder if it has a default app for those file types which is somehow overriding Designer.