Self-hosted Ente Web App Connecting to Official Back-end

[inferenceus]

Despite adding my own URL endpoints for my domain (I have also tested localhost), Ente's web app still connects to the official production servers rather than my own Ente Museum instance.

How can I debug this issue?

[mnvr]

The NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT variable controls where the web app connects to

ente/web/apps/photos/.env

Line 42 in 966ac24

# NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT = http://localhost:3000

If it is not working, then likely it is not being picked up properly by your build. One quick way to test would be to add a console.log to the customAPIOrigin function to see what it is returning when the app runs

ente/web/packages/base/origins.ts

Line 57 in 966ac24

export const customAPIOrigin = async () =>

then run the web app locally using a dev server

cd web
yarn dev

to see what gets printed in the browser console

[inferenceus]

The NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT variable controls where the web app connects to

@mnvr Is this supposed to be the Museum location? For example, if Museum is running on localhost:8080, that should be the value for web app's NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT value?

[mnvr]

Yes! Include the scheme (e.g. "http://localhost:8080")

[inferenceus]

Yes! Include the scheme (e.g. "http://localhost:8080")

@mnvr Okay, that's been set. In Museum's server/museum.yaml file, should public-albums be set to http://localhost:3000 for web app, or the URL of web app?

[mnvr]

public-albums needs to be set to the URL of the albums app (which is different from the URL of the web app). More details about it are here - https://help.ente.io/self-hosting/installation/config#app-endpoints

When configuring the albums app, you'd also need to set the NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT.

In more details, currently the same code is used to build both the web app (that is, the photos app for logged in users) and the albums app (the view only app that serves shared albums and public links). When configuring the web app, only NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT is needed, since it tells the web app where self hosted museum is. When configuring the shared albums app, both apps.public-albums and NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT needs to be set in addition to NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT. Both apps.public-albums and NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT are the URL where you will be running the shared albums app.

If something is not clear, you should be able to find more details about these in

• Help - https://help.ente.io/self-hosting
• In previous GitHub issue and discussions
• Source code and config files have a lot of comments too

Hope this helps!

[inferenceus]

@mnvr I have to be honest, the Ente official documentation is pretty bad. I still haven't been able to get this to work, despite being a network administrator and having a load of other self-hosted services running. There's a load of stuff missing, and details which explain what should be running where just don't exist. I'm considering dropping Ente because it's just too lacking in documentation.

I did exactly as you said, read the documentation multiple times, checked every file, added the environment variables (Where? Since the documentation doesn't tell you which user it should be under; web server or Ente user?), recompiled everything multiple times, and generated new keys, yet it still connects to Ente's official back-end.