Please note that in the HW install instructions it tells one that installing this way is "... an Experimental feature 🧪 and it relies on community support.". The preferred installation method is still using a Docker container.

Removal of the /var/www/html/admin directory happens because the whole /var/www/html directory is removed in the start script: https://github.com/jokob-sk/Pi.Alert/blob/main/dockerfiles/start.sh#L40

@jokob-sk I think the way NGINX and the /var/www/html directory is currently setup/configured on startup won't allow another website to be served.

@Sean-Brooks sorry to hear about the issue. Hope it didn't impact your data.
@lorki97 Thank you for pinpointing the issue. Do you have an idea how to solve it? I will try to have a look over the weekend as well 🤔

@Sean-Brooks sorry to hear about the issue. Hope it didn't impact your data.
@lorki97 Thank you for pinpointing the issue. Do you have an idea how to solve it? I will try to have a look over the weekend as well 🤔

@jokob-sk The issue was all my complete doing, nothing you contributed to. Thank you for the work you've put into this project. I updated the issue verbiage.

@lorki97 Thank you for the feedback. I appreciated the time/effort you put into your reply.

I have PiHole installed myself (altough in a Docker container) and this is the /var/www/html directory in that container:

user@hostname:/# ls -lah /var/www/html/
total 12K
drwxrwxr-x 1 www-data www-data  3 Oct 10 19:06 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root     root      3 May 28 04:03 ..
drwxr-xr-x 7 root     root     47 May 30 20:51 admin
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 13 Oct 10 19:08 custom_disable_timer

The lighttpd config included in PiHole listens on port 80 and serves the whole /var/html/www directory by default. There is also a redirect in pihole-admin.conf which redirects to the admin console http://pi.hole/admin/ if only the PiHole host URL gets entered (http://pi.hole). This differs from the Docker container config but should be no problem.

PiAlert is by default served on a different port (20211) than PiHole (80) so this already avoids a conflict there. Maybe putting the PiAlert web files into e.g. /var/www/html/pialert/ and serve with NGINX web root set to that directory would be enough to fix this problem. Then the setup file can still delete the new directory to make sure no old files are in there without interfering with other web files.

Now on to NGINX. Currently the server config is symlinked to sites-available named default. I found out that this seems to be a Debian thing and not a NGINX default (https://serverfault.com/a/870709). So maybe it is best to change this to a named config file inside the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory, such as /etc/nginx/conf.d/pialert.conf. This way we would no longer interfere with other possible default configs and be more distribution agnostic.

Let me know what you think @jokob-sk

@lorki97 I don't have an issue with that 👍are you able to help out with a PR? We just need to make sure the On-HW and docker build don't have issues.

Yes, I'll setup a test environment on my machine and check it against a "bare-metal" PiHole installation.

@lorki97 Thank you in advance 🙏

@jokob-sk Please take a look at https://github.com/jokob-sk/Pi.Alert/pull/505, especially the issue with buildtimestamp.txt. You create this in the Dockerfile and thus is missing in a HW install. But inserting this into the install.sh would overwrite your execution in the Dockerfile and create it at each startup thus "disabling" (circumventing) the version check system. Any ideas on how to solve this?

hummm, how about adding a check if the file exists and only create it if it is missing?

That's the easy way 😄 If there is not a lot of requests for a HW install leaving it at this quick simple - works with PiHole (on Debian) - fix should be enough.

let's keep it simple for now - really appreciate the help here @lorki97 🙏bash scripts are not my strong suit. Feel free to also add a disclaimer in the docs to make sure the limitations are clear for the HW-only install.

@Sean-Brooks the PR supposed to fix this has been merged. You might want to try installing it. Just in case backup your PiHole install first.

closing as released 🚀