Print Button

[gusman80]

Question: Can anybody give me a hint on how to make the snake-label webif expose a print button that lets me directly print the converted png.

I have a server with brother-ql, brother-ql-web and snake-label running. instead of dumping the file to a folder after converting and downloading , and waiting for my daemon to print it, i would love to have a print button next to the "save" button that directly prints the png on my brother label printer.

Can anybody give me a small hint on how i could transfer the file and print it "on click". (i should be able to implement this myself.)
maybe execute a post request to the brother-ql-web api with the image as attachment
anyway thx, and great project!

[socram70]

This is a few years old, but I'm also very interested in the solution. Did you find one?

[MaxWinterstein]

Just leaving some thought here for later me:

Maybe we can use the rendered image and throw it against the brother-ql-web API endpoint for image printing.

Found some fork that provides it nicely:

https://github.com/FriedrichFroebel/brother_ql_web/blob/46d6fd224a2135052e1ad2de1dcf760de3552dce/brother_ql_web/web.py#L166

[typingbeaver]

Hi there, thanks for your ideas!

Originally I was thinking about adding CLI support, so snake_label could directly pipe into brother_ql.

Adding support for the brother_ql_web API would be nice, but I'm unsure as it isn't provided by the main project. Also the site would have to use a cookie to save your local server endpoint (or could be added by a url parameter) and clutters the interface for 'normal users'.

Another idea would be to add support via WebUSB, so reimplement brother_ql via JS like shown by tylercrumpton/brotherql-webusb. Downside: WebUSB isn't widely supported (e. g. not implemented in Firefox) and printing only works if the printer is connected to your local machine.

[bin101]

I vibe coded a little backend docker container which will be triggered by the button and then sends the image to the backend service. The service pushes the image into an input folder on my NAS which will trigger a file watcher systemd service I already used before.

The systemd service then utilize brother_ql CLI commands to print it on my brother label printer.

Works pretty good so far with toast notifications and so on but the code is not reviewed by me completely and pretty rough.

[socram70]

That sounds interesting, would you mind sharing the code via your Github account?

[bin101]

I don't want to make it available in a public repository as it is but I zipped the corresponding files to share it here.

THIS IS NOT INTENDED TO RUN WITH PUBLIC ACCESS

It is missing a complete review and security features. Feel free to use it as an idea to write sth secure for public sharing.

Archive.zip

[socram70]

I would never expose my printer or the service to the internet and don't think anybody should. Thank you for sharing!

[socram70]

IU used a slightly different approach and added a print button which works with the API of https://github.com/tbnobody/brother_ql_web (after some minor modifications here: https://github.com/socram70/brother_ql_web). You will find the modifications to snake-label here: https://github.com/socram70/snake-label/tree/brother-ql-print

Everything is tested and working fine in my LAN.

[seneca13]

Sorry, maybe an noob question, but...
Could You explain how to get this in to a working condition (install Your forks of brother_ql_web & snake-label in to the same directory, or ...)

P.S.
brother_ql_web readme.md says " Debian 10 (Buster)" will it work with Debian 12 (Bookworm) too?

[bin101]

@socram70 as localhost for the brother_ql_web instance works you should make the configuration of "Drucker-URL" optional and by default use the localhost url imho.

[bin101]

Then you can show/hide the Print button if the instance is not available.

[socram70]

@seneca13 I think we all started with noob questions at some point. I think a lot of people are using snake-lalbel and know the ql_web_project, so I created a docker-compose.qlweb.yml which you can find here https://github.com/socram70/snake-label/.

Evertyhing is described in the readme.md and I think this is the easiest way to get this working. Make sure to edit the application.py and enter the URL of your printer. You don't need to worry about Debian 10 or 12 with Docker, but yes, if you're not using Docker, it should work with Debian 12 as well.

I also love your idea @bin101 of making this more user-friendly. As localhost will only work if you work on the same machine and not (like me and probably others) if you are using a separate server in your network, I changed this as follows:

I added a printer settings link in grey below in case you want to modify the settings manually. If the connection to localhost:8013 is working (which it should if you use the compose stack), the Printer URL (not Drucker anymore to keep it consistently in English) are not shown and the print button is available. If the connection to localhost:8013 (or the configured address) is not working, the Printer URL will be shown and can be configured until it works.

[bin101]

@socram70
It works with a separate server when using the docker bridge network driver e.g.:

services:
  brother-ql-web:
    image: ghcr.io/socram70/brother_ql_web:latest
    ports:
      - "8013:8013"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/app/instance:ro
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - snake-label-network

  snake-label:
    image: ghcr.io/socram70/snake-label:latest
    depends_on:
      - brother-ql-web
    ports:
      - "3003:80"
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - snake-label-network

networks:
  snake-label-network:
    driver: bridge

[socram70]

I know, thank you, but my point wasn't the connectivity, but the default setting in snake-label to "localhost". The bridge network is how I operate it too (via my nginx proxy manager network). If you're using the docker compose on a server which you access from another device in the network, the localhost setting obviously doesn't make sense. My intention was to create a solution of which @typingbeaver would also benefit and which would allow the users to configure ql-web-servers individually (e.g., if they are using snake-label.de) in their networks so that one online-hosted solution could still be used to print on local ql-web-entities. For self-hosted only environments, I would have used another way to configure the connection to ql-web. I hope this makes sense as it seems I've been a little unclear before.

[bin101]

@socram70 Another thing (maybe you should enable issues in your fork):

Using an os wide dark theme the input field is white and has white text.