TheWall is a web application for managing a wall of screens. It can show multiple web pages, images, and videos on a large or wall of screens. Layouts can be created and changed on the fly using a drag-and-drop web interface.

The output is displayed by Firefox running in fullscreen mode. To use a grid of screens, NVidia Mosaic or AMD Eyefinity is advised to be used to create a single large display.

TheWall is a web application built with Nuxt. To run the application, you need to have Node.js and NPM installed.

To run the application for development, follow these steps:

npm install
npm run dev

Due to CSP and Frame-Options headers, by default, you can't embed all external websites. To circumvent this, you need to install the browser extension, provided in the extension folder. This extension will remove the headers from the response, allowing you to embed any website.

In standard versions of Firefox, to install the extension, open about:debugging in Firefox, click on This Firefox, and then Load Temporary Add-on.

To install the extension permanently, the Developer Edition of Firefox is required. To use unsigned extensions in the Developer Edition of Firefox, you need to set the xpinstall.signatures.required preference to false in about:config. Afterwards you can create a zip file of the extension folder and change the extension's file extension to .xpi. This extension can then be installed by dragging the file into the Firefox window.

The wall computer can access the rendered wall by visiting https://SERVER_IP:3000/WALL_ID. You can make TheWall fullscreen by pressing F11. To allow TheWall to run fullscreen by default, you can set the full-screen-api.allow-trusted-requests-only preference to false in about:config. This will allow TheWall (and any other website) to request fullscreen mode without user interaction.

If you installed the extension, you will be redirected to the extension options page if TheWall is running on a different origin than https://localhost:3000. As a security measure, you need to set the origin of the server on the options page. If you want to allow injecting custom JavaScript, you need to enable the Allow JavaScript injects option.

The control computer can access the control panel by visiting https://SERVER_IP:3000/WALL_ID/control.

Where SERVER_IP is the IP address of the server running the application, and WALL_ID is the ID of the wall you want to access.

Ensure that the server running TheWall is thrusted and not accessible by unauthorized users. TheWall does support basic authentication by creating a users.json file in the root of the project. The file should contain a array of objects with the following structure:

[
  {
    "username": "admin",
    "password": "password"
  }
]

It is advised to run the application behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS enabled if you want to access the application over a network.

Everyone with access to the server can change the websites displayed on the wall and inject custom CSS and if enabled also inject custom JavaScript. The extension will also reduce the security of the displayed websites by changing security related headers.

Copyright 2024 Iwan Timmer. Distributed under the GNU AGPL v3. For full terms see the COPYING file

Available under alternative licensing terms upon request.