Inter-app communication in 24.10 Electric Eel

[Stux]

@tjhorner

In 24.10, do apps deployed from the official catalog show up as Compose stacks in Portainer

They show up, but are not editable. Same in Dockge.

@tjhorner

but that requires breaking out of the TrueNAS-managed app catalog. I’d like to stick with the official catalog

Right now, there is no way to do this with the official catalog.

I think the ability to bind an app port to a specific IP alias may be an app catalog feature soon, but custom networking with app catalog apps will probably not be a feature in EE. Maybe it will be in Fangtooth. It was originally mentioned as an Electric Eel feature.

You can perform IP binding or setup custom networks and macvlan networks using custom yaml apps or raw docker-compose, Dockge or Portainer.

(I am working on a video for this)

No. They won’t appear in the app’s view, unless you use the custom yaml option.

Perhaps vote for these features

Display non-ix managed stacks and containers on apps screen

Electric Eel includes Docker, and Docker Compose is used to power the apps The apps screen displays IX managed stacks. It would be helpful to also view non-IX managed stacks, and non stack containers. They could be displayed with generic icons, and the Details information could show generic information. docker has a property on all stacks which defines their stack, and containers without this property are not stacks. This would allow a user to understand what containers and stacks are runni…

Add "Bind IP Address" to app "port" selection UIs

There is no way to bind an app’s port mapping to a specific IP address in Electric Eel beta. If an IP Alias is added to an interface, then that IP Alias can be used when configuring port mapping in raw docker-compose. eg: ports: - 192.168.0.40:80:80 Will bind port 80 on the host’s 192.168.0.40 IP alias to port 80 in the container. Of course, for the above to work, the TrueNAS UI must first be bound to a specific IP instead of 0.0.0.0 Similarly, docker will bind to 0.0.0.0 by default,…

Allow apps to have their own IP

Problem/Justification Add ability to use separate IPs on apps in Electric Eel. With GUI manageability. Impact It will be similar to a CORE jail. User Story I don’t think this needs much of a story. It’s very practical to have apps using their own network stack.

Although none of those are actually the custom network feature you are requesting.

I think the custom network feature could be implemented with 1) a network editing gui and 2) app config options for assigning networks.

And if you decide that you do want to go the raw compose/Dockge route, a smooth migration can be performed by first migrating to docker compose in a sandbox in Dragonfish

TrueNAS Scale: Setting up Sandboxes with Jailmaker

And then you can migrate from the sandbox to native docker (or not)

TrueNAS Scale: Migrating Sandboxes to Docker in Electric Eel // Compose, Dockge & Jailmaker

Of course, the other option is to wait for Fangtooth to see if that satisfies your requirements.