feat: allow specifying port in robot url, so that user could use port other than 31950

[arogozhnikov]

Overview

solutions for tunneling like cloudflared and ngrok do not provide freedom to choose which port used to expose service:

tunnel.at.cloudflare.com:80 -> [opentrons]localhost:31950

Now, app needs only one port to be exposed, so I'm running an additional redirection to get it working:

[laptop]:localhost:31950 -> tunnel.at.cloudflare.com:80 

Now I can specify 127.0.0.1 as an address in opentrons app and it seems to work normally (robot is seen, I can operate with it).

Side comment: Interestingly, it understands IP, but does not understand localhost.

I've tried to specify here both address and port (first line, partially covered name), but that does not work. Tried with http:https://, https:// and without protocol - no success.
That would be more convenient and more reliable than an additional SSH forward.

Importance: 3/5.

Implementation details

No response

Design

No response

Acceptance criteria

No response

[arogozhnikov]

may I remind that issue is about supporting specifying a dnsname+port in the app?

No difference for me if localhost is resolved or not, and I do not develop opentrons server.

[mcous]

Hi @arogozhnikov, thanks for the request! We'd be happy to accept a PR for this issue. This is the location where the list of address strings from that UI is turned into a host + port pair. A solution that accounts for the optional presence of a colon seems like it would do the trick, as long as it accounts for IPv6 addresses:

opentrons/app-shell/src/discovery.ts

Lines 49 to 53 in 7a2e56a

	const makeManualAddresses = (addrs: string | string[]): Address[] => {
	return ['fd00:0:cafe:fefe::1']
	.concat(addrs)
	.map(ip => ({ ip, port: DEFAULT_PORT }))
	}

[arogozhnikov]

Thanks for pointer @mcous

I've tried to meaningfully contribute, but I wasn't able to install dev environment on mac.

I have stable versions of nodejs and python, npm i even for app shell can't complete because of version conflicts.
I blamed wrong nodejs version and tried installing deprecated version with nix-shell without success (nix basically tries to compile nodejs from scratch).

[mcous]

@arogozhnikov I no longer work at Opentrons, so I won't be able to be of much help, but I can tell you that much of the Opentrons development team works on macOS, so the development environment actually tends to work pretty well on mac.

The development setup guide has pretty detailed instructions for setting up a development environment on macOS. If you're still interested in contributing, you might have some luck following that guide

[arogozhnikov]

I've managed to set things up.

Changing function above to handle user-provided ports had only partial effect.

In this example I forwarded 127.0.0.1:3033 to ot2:31950. App does not reflect that it is reachable in 'Connect to a Robot via IP Address' menu (it is!):

Device at the same time appears in the list of available devices:

Interface does not reflect recent runs and pipettes, and behaves weird.

I am not sure I can help with fixing those, so I'd be glad if someone more familiar with codebase takes a look at this.