The SDK to make balena powered JavaScript applications.
The official JavaScript balena SDK.
The intention of this module is to provide developers a nice API to integrate their JavaScript applications with balena.
Install the balena SDK by running:
$ npm install --save balena-sdk
We currently support NodeJS (10+) and the browser.
The following features are node-only: - OS image streaming download (
balena.models.os.download), - balena settings client (
balena.settings).
In Node you can simply
require('balena-sdk'), but in the browser things are more complicated. The balena SDK provides a bundled single file for browsers, which allows you to include a single file with all dependencies included, available as balena-browser.min.js (or balena-browser.js if you'd like the much larger unminified version). This uses the UMD format, and will register itself as either a CommonJS or AMD module called
balena-sdkif possible, or create a
balenaSdkglobal if not. You can also use the
es2018version if desired.
If you're using webpack, browserify, or a similar tool then you probably want to bundle the balena SDK into your application yourself, rather than using the pre-built
balena-browser.jsbundle. If you do that, you should be aware that you may pick up some dependencies that are actually unnecessary in the browser, because they're only used in Node environments. You can safely exclude these dependencies, if you're not using them yourself, and significantly reduce the size of your resulting bundle.
In the browser the balena SDK doesn't use the following dependencies:
For the future we're looking at ways to automatically exclude these in downstream bundles. See #254 for more information.
The balena SDK includes builds for various ECMAScript versions that are dynamically selected at runtime (using @balena/es-version). For this reason, packagers like pkg are not able to automatically detect which assets to include in the output package. The following sample
pkgsection should be added to your application's
package.jsonfile to instruct
pkgto bundle the required assets:
"pkg": { "scripts": [ "node_modules/balena-sdk/**/*.js" ], "assets": [ "node_modules/balena-pine/**/*", "node_modules/pinejs-client-core/**/*" ] }
For more information, please refer to the respective documentation from the
pkgproject.
The module exports a single factory function. Use it like this:
var balena = require('balena-sdk')({ apiUrl: "https://api.balena-cloud.com/", dataDirectory: "/opt/local/balena" })
Where the factory method accepts the following options: *
apiUrl, string, optional, is the balena API url. Defaults to
https://api.balena-cloud.com/, *
builderUrl, string, optional , is the balena builder url. Defaults to
https://builder.balena-cloud.com/, *
deviceUrlsBase, string, optional, is the base balena device API url. Defaults to
balena-devices.com, *
dataDirectory, string, optional, ignored in the browser, is the directory where the user settings are stored, normally retrieved like
require('balena-settings-client').get('dataDirectory'). Defaults to
$HOME/.balena, *
isBrowser, boolean, optional, is the flag to tell if the module works in the browser. If not set will be computed based on the presence of the global
windowvalue, *
debug, boolean, optional, when set will print some extra debug information.
See the JSDoc markdown documentation for the returned
balenaobject in DOCUMENTATION.md.
If you face any issues, please raise an issue on GitHub and the balena team will be happy to help.
The balena SDK uses semver versioning, with the concepts of major, minor and patch version releases.
The latest release of the previous major version of the balena SDK will remain compatible with the balenaCloud backend services for one year from the date when the next major version is released. For example, balena SDK v12.33.4, as the latest v12 release, would remain compatible with the balenaCloud backend for one year from the date when v13.0.0 is released.
At the end of this period, the older major version is considered deprecated and some of the functionality that depends on balenaCloud services may stop working at any time. Users are encouraged to regularly update the balena SDK to the latest version.
In order to run the balena SDK test suite, set the following environment variables from an account that exists and doesn't have a billing account code: WARNING: This will delete all applications and public keys of the test users. As such, all emails are required to contain the string
+testsdkto avoid accidental deletion
TEST_EMAIL: The main account email.
TEST_PASSWORD: The main account password.
TEST_USERNAME: The main account username.
TEST_MEMBER_EMAIL: The email of the account for the membership tests.
TEST_MEMBER_PASSWORD: The password of the account for the membership tests.
TEST_MEMBER_USERNAME: The username of the account for the membership tests.
You also have to provide the following environment variables from an account that doesn't yet exist:
TEST_REGISTER_EMAIL: The email of the account to register.
TEST_REGISTER_PASSWORD: The password of the account to register.
TEST_REGISTER_USERNAME: The username of the account to register.
In order to test the billing methods for a paid account, you also have to configure the following environment variables:
TEST_PAID_EMAIL: The email of the paid account.
TEST_PAID_PASSWORD: The password of the account.
Note: The paid user's
account billing codeshould be set to
testdevso that it's tested against the test plan.
You can also, optionally, set the
TEST_API_URLenvironment variable in order to run the tests using a different API backend (eg:
https://api.balena-staging.com).
You can persist these settings by putting them all into a
.envfile in the root of this repo, in dotenv format (
KEY=VALUE\n). This will be automatically detected and used in the tests. Make sure you don't accidentally commit this file (
.envby default is gitignored, so hopefully this should be difficult).
Run the test suite by doing:
$ npm test
In order to make the develop & test cycle faster: * You can use mocha's
.only&
.skipvariants to only run the subset of the test cases that is relevant to your changes/additions. You should make sure to remove those from your code before you push and make sure that the complete test suite completes successfully. * You can use
npm run test:fastwhich fixes linting issues, only builds for a single ES target and runs the tests only on node. This can save time when implementing a method that interacts with an API endpoint, but should be avoided if the feature might work different or only in the browser.
Before submitting a PR, please make sure that you * don't have uncommited changes on the documentation or the build output * don't have any
.onlyor
.skipin your tests * include typings for new methods * include tests and that they pass
$ npm test
The project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.