Octoprint with socat for remote printers

This is a Dockerfile to set up OctoPrint using an idea from vladbabii/homeassistant-socat to connect to network printers.

It also may be useful for running in a docker-based cluster such as swarm.

Based on nunofgs/octoprint image published on Docker Hub (as this is currently the most flexible image available which also supports the lightweight alpine), and homeassistant-socat for the main idea on how to acheive this.

This is a new project and many issues are expected!!

Usage

Instead of using a locally-connected printer (usb serial device), we can use the serial device mapped over the network with ser2net and then map it to a local zwave serial device with socat.

This docker container ensures that

• A serial device is mapped in the local docker with socat

• Octoprint is running

If there are any failures, both socat and octoprint will be restarted.

Example ser2net config

7676:raw:600:/dev/ttyACM0:115200 8DATABITS NONE 1STOPBIT

Environment options:

All Octoprint variables are available and on top of that a few others have been added:

DEBUG_VERBOSE=0

Set to 1 to see more information

Default: 0

PAUSE_BETWEEN_CHECKS=2

In seconds, how much time to wait between checking running processes.

Default: 2

LOG_TARGET=/log.log

Path to log file. Ommit to write logs to stdout.

Default: stdout

SOCAT_PRINTER_TYPE="tcp"

SOCAT_PRINTER_HOST="192.168.5.5"

SOCAT_PRINTER_PORT="7676"

Where socat should connect to - will be used as tcp://192.168.5.5:7676

SOCAT_PRINTER_LINK="/dev/ttyACM0"

What the printer's serial device should be mapped to. Use this in octoprint's configuration files.