Dashboard service discovery

[f-laurens]

It would be nice if DietPi-Dashboard would make itself discoverable by mDNS/Bonjour browsers by setting up an avahi-daemon service file. Something like (/etc/avahi/services/dietpi_dashboard.service):

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file -->
<service-group>
  <name replace-wildcards="yes">DietPi dashboard (%h)</name>
  <service>
    <type>_http._tcp</type>
    <port>5252</port>
    <txt-record>vendor=DietPi</txt-record>
    <txt-record>model=Pi</txt-record>
  </service>
</service-group>

[MichaIng]

Well, an admin dashboard is probably not what you want to make discoverable throughout the network, is it? However, if so, it makes sense to have this entirely optional. What we could do is either add it as choice in dietpi-software, which adds the dependency on Avahi daemon as well, or document how to achieve it in our documentation for now. But I'm very sceptic whether this is something which should promote itself at all or not the other way round, do everything to hide/masquerade itself 🤔.

[f-laurens]

Well... this was just a suggestion.
You might just mention it in the documentation.

[MichaIng]

I didn't want to sound like this request should be closed, that is only my opinion on this, as being someone who always (wants to) explicitly enter known IPs/hostnames and ports for LAN services and uses bookmarks in case to store them. I'm completely open to get more opinions and use cases where mDNS discovery is handy for the dashboard in particular.

[f-laurens]

Fine, I'll leave this open.
Having this just documented (for others - I don't need it ;-) would be perfectly fine for me.

[MichaIng]

Jep, that should be fine. I opened an issue at the docs repo so we do not forgot about it: MichaIng/DietPi-Docs#695
Since this could be handy (and probably even more reasonable) for many other web UI/API software titles, we could go for a more generic approach and add Avahi templates (gradually) for all of them.