Genie Community Forum

Local deployment of almond-server "Lost connection to the server."

User Support
#1

I’m running a local deployment of almond-server using docker (using latest-portable since I’m not interested in audio capture). The server starts correctly, but after setting up the password I can’t actually use it because, on the conversation tab I see the “Lost connection to the server.” warning.

Debugging a little bit I realized that the websocket connection to /conversation is getting closed as soon as it’s getting opened.

I don’t know if this is related, but I also got the same error in https://almond.stanford.edu until I created an account.

#2

Hi @carlos5678, welcome to the forum!

How did you set up your docker container, that is, what networking? Do you have a proxy in front?
The problem might be the Origin check, if the connection appears to be coming to the server from a remote client, but the browser thinks it’s connecting to localhost.

#3

Docker container is connected to an internal docker network that is fronted by NGINX as a reverse proxy.

This is my ansible configuration for the container, syntax is different from docker-compose, but I think it’s pretty straightforward

    - name: Setup almond
      docker_container:
        name: almond
        image: stanfordoval/almond-server:latest-portable
        state: started
        restart_policy: unless-stopped
        networks:
          - name: nginx_network
        volumes:
          - "/nas-main-vol/confs/home/almond:/var/lib/almond-server"

If I connect directly to the almond instance without going through NGINX it does work. How can I configure it to support the proxying from NGINX?

#4

To use NGINX as reverse proxy, you can either:

  • set up NGINX to perform authentication, then disable almond-server’s internal authentication, by setting THINGENGINE_HOST_BASED_AUTHENTICATION=insecure
  • set up NGINX to check the Origin header (which should match the hostname you’ll use through the browser), and then override the header to the same protocol://ip:port that nginx uses to talk to Almond

https://github.com/stanford-oval/almond-server/issues/37 has some additional discussion of different configuration options.

#5

Thanks for the help @gcampax

I Added the env var THINGENGINE_HOST_BASED_AUTHENTICATION=insecure to the docker configuration and although Almond no longer asks for a password, the conversation panel still says "Lost connection to the server.” :frowning:

Checked and the websocket is still being disconnected.

#6

You probably still needs to set the Origin header.

Your setup is very similar to that used by official Home Assistant addon, which also has a nginx load-balancer. So you can probably use a similar configuration as