Need help solving weird Plone 6 Volto frontend problem

klm · November 8, 2022, 1:21pm

I believe I've got my containers install working so I can fully access it via the Volto frontend from browsers not on the same host where the containers are working. It required the change @tiberiuichim mentioned and also an obscure provision for my UFW firewall configuration on the containers host, worth describing in detail.

As @tiberiuichim mentioned:

tiberiuichim:

I notice that the documentation (https://6.dev-docs.plone.org/install/containers/index.html) contains this command:
docker run --name plone6-frontend --link plone6-backend:backend -e RAZZLE_API_PATH=http://localhost:8080/Plone -e RAZZLE_INTERNAL_API_PATH=http://backend:8080/Plone -d -p 3000:3000 plone/plone-frontend:latest
The RAZZLE_API_PATH env var should point to the publicly-available Plone backend domain. It will be used by the end-user browser to connect to Plone using the ++api++ traversers and special rules. So it needs to be properly adjusted to your custom case.

One way to indicate this would be to use RAZZLE_API_PATH=http://$HOSTNAME:8080/Plone instead of RAZZLE_API_PATH=http://localhost:8080/Plone, but this would fail mysteriously in cases where $HOSTNAME is not the fully qualified domain name. It seems like the instructions are going to require some elaboration on this point.

Arranging for port 8080 on the container host to be accessible remotely requires a more complicated UFW allow command than I expected. The simple UFW command I thought would work, sudo UFW allow 8080 is not sufficient. Here's what does work: sudo ufw route allow proto tcp from any to any port 8080.
This is derived from a suggestion in a well-informed resource for reconciling operation of UFW with containers, https://github.com/chaifeng/ufw-docker. (Sorry, I can't yet post proper links.)

As a bonus point, I found it quite helpful to use the browser developer toolkit's network call tracing facility, to see what's going on behind the scenes. I have a lot to learn about debugging container-based apps, so that provided some insight that I would normally get by watching the server log files.

I intend to file a few bug reports, including one concerning the containers documentation. I consider my problem solved, and am grateful for the help!