Separate frontend and backend

[robdejonge]

The fact that we can add frontend: false to our configuration file (also the default, I believe), obviously means that we can run only the backend of the application somewhere. I was wondering if this means the frontend can be run in isolation too.

I run z2m on a Pi Zero that is positioned for optimal signal, but would run the frontend on the virtual machine I have Home Assistant running on. I guess the frontend does not use a whole lot of resources, but still ...

[mausch]

You can, see https://www.npmjs.com/package/zigbee2mqtt-frontend

[robdejonge]

Interesting. A few questions I can't see answered on that site or the related repo:

1. Can this run anywhere, or does it need to be on the same machine as z2m?
2. To run this, do I need to enable frontend: true on the z2m install?

Thanks for the suggestion!

[mausch]

1. I've not tried it but AFAICT it can run anywhere, just set the Z2M_API_URI env var
2. Pretty sure you still need it enabled, yes, for the websocket server.

like koenkk said you don't really save much by putting the frontend somewhere else, I think you only save the static file serving really.

[robdejonge]

Thanks, much appreciated!

[Koenkk]

The frontend runs in your browser, therefore the only difference between frontend: true/frontend: false is that with true a websocket server is started which is used by the frontend to communicate with z2m. So IMO there would be no benefit of this.

[robdejonge]

Thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.