noVNC/portal, tunnel, notifications, ARM, docker

[vogler]

Planning/discussion issue for the ideas that came up in #11

• noVNC to remote-control browser for login or captcha

• tunnel / reverse proxy for easy access from outside the local network

  @jackblk: I think implementing noVNC is nice, because if we meet captcha, we can send a notification to our device (maybe use apprise?). Then user can open noVNC to control the browser, solve the captcha & claim the game. It has password built in so it's fine to forward the port. Maybe we can use ngrok to tunnel it as well.

  @vogler: ngrok docs look like you need an API key to use it? Here are some alternatives we could try:

  • https://github.com/berstend/hypertunnel
  • https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel

  Via ssh in docker: https://serveo.net

  Alternative: puppeteer-extra-plugin-portal, but unclear if it works with Playwright.

• notifications

  apprise is in Python and I didn't find any JS bindings or an alternative project for nodejs.
  We could use it in the docker image, but it would be nicer to send notifications from the JS files.
  We could shell out from JS, but then you'd still have the setup problem for people not using the docker image. @vogler

• GitHub actions to upload to Docker hub

• Reduce the image size (alpine, Firefox instead of Chromium) slim docker image #68

  @jackblk: As much as I want to use Alpine image, it doesn't work with Playwright due to browser binaries again (alpine uses musl instead of glibc).

• ARM support Run on Raspberry Pi -> requires 64-bit OS #3

  @jackblk: Consider using Firefox? -> can fix raspberry arm 32bit issue, smaller size
  @jackblk: Playwright browser binaries only fully supports amd64 and arm64 for now. This means the docker image will not work for Raspberry <4.
  For arm 32 bit, using local built browser for armhf won't work even if we use executablePath. If you can find a way for it to work with executablePath then we can consider but I doubt it.
  @vogler: Raspberry Pi (3, 4, Zero 2): Raspbian won't work since it's 32-bit, but Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) or Ubuntu will.

[vogler]

@jackblk I added you as a collaborator and created a project board: https://github.com/vogler/free-games-claimer/projects/1

Not sure what's better, I guess having this meta issue is enough to keep an overview.

[jackblk]

@vogler I made it so it can work with Alpine in branch docker-alpine-wip. The chromium shipped with playwright will not work in Alpine because of musl/glibc incompatibility, so I tried using chromium build shipped with Alpine packages.

It can run, but it will be detected by captcha and I have to reset my IP for a clean one 😞 .

So for now, I save the progress in the branch, but we have to abandon this method until Playwright has better support for Alpine.

---

For your Raspberry 4 (arm64?), maybe the problem is with 32bit userland? Because we can only use Chromium coming from Playwright to evade captcha, I don't think it can be supported. So right now we can only support x86/x64 and arm64 (only tested on Mac M1). Firefox approach seems to be a dead end for Raspberry too, because Playwright needs patched binaries for Firefox & Webkit.

[vogler]

Maybe use

• https://github.com/klaussinani/signale for logging with colors and timer - right now the log isn't easy to read
• https://github.com/terkelg/prompts maybe for prompting the user for initial config or login data
• https://github.com/breejs/bree as a cross-platform job scheduler

[vogler]

Heads-up: I'll move userDataDir -> data/browser, screenshots -> data/screenshots such that there's just one directory with all user data to ignore and map into docker.

[vogler]

GitHub Action to build and push images: https://github.com/vogler/free-games-claimer/blob/main/.github/workflows/docker.yml
Also see #31.

[vogler]

Notifications merged with #49.

[vogler]

Running on ARM requires 64-bit (not just available for RPi4), mentioned in readme:

Raspberry Pi (3, 4, Zero 2): Raspbian won't work since it's 32-bit, but Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) or Ubuntu will.