Tutorial - Grafana rendering on Raspberry Pi

[wezzix (Markus)]

I got Grafana rendering working on RPi 4 (4Gb) running openhabian using a mix of the steps above and some more. Rendering takes approximately 5 seconds, so the webview solution is faster. But here we go:

@David_deMarco

Base assumption:

• Raspberry Pi V4 with OpenHabian (Buster) installed - Custom install should be fine
• You have already installed and have a working version of influxDB and Grafana.
• Node is installed on your Raspberry PI. I use Node-Red from the openHabian install which installs Node

InfluxDB and Grafana should be fairly straightforward to install in openhabian using sudo openhabian-config.
However, nodejs needed to be version 12 for yarn run build, whereas the the default repositories will install v10 and the latest will install v13. To install nodejs v12 i followed the instruction titled “Major version upgrades” here but make sure to change 13 to 12 like so:

sudo su
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash -
apt install nodejs
node -v

Then I followed the OP:

@David_deMarco

Install git and clone copy of the plugin.

apt-get update
apt-get install git
cd /var/lib/grafana/plugins
git clone https://github.com/grafana/grafana-image-renderer
cd grafana-image-renderer
npm -g install yarn

I cannot tell which of the following steps were necessary, but I did them as a part of trial and error:

@shutterfreak

Now we’ll update npm , just in case:

npm -g install npm

Now we’ll install yarn and typescript :

npm -g install yarn
npm -g install typescript

The following line is essential for compiling the plugin’s dependencies on a RPi3B+ on openhabian buster:

npm config set unsafe-perm=true

We can now at last add the Node.JS dependencies to compile the plugin:

npm i grpc

npm i husky
npm i puppeteer
npm i postinstall
npm i install
npm install

(There was no grpc-plugin.ts to edit - no need)
Apparently yarn install was important too:

yarn install --pure-lockfile
yarn run build
cp plugin_start_linux_amd64 plugin_start_linux_arm

Now after restarting grafana, grafana renderer would complain in the log /var/log/grafana/grafana.log about executable not found, so we install chromium (1Gb):

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

And make the renderer plugin use the chromium executable as pointed out above:

@petero

Add this line

export GF_RENDERER_PLUGIN_CHROME_BIN="/usr/bin/chromium-browser"

just above the

node ${DIR}/build/app.js

in plugin_start_linux_arm

Finally:

@David_deMarco

Now restart grafana

sudo systemctl restart grafana-server.service

give it about 20 seconds to start

sudo systemctl status grafana-server.service

If all has gone well the log will show the plugin is recognised and loaded.
Log file can be found at

cd /var/log/grafana

I have likely missed something, but this is roughly how I got it working. I’m not an expert - I just put the pieces together. Hope it helps.