Nodered + Telegram Bot as web proxy?

General
1

I have node-red running on an RPi in my local network. None of my devices are accessible from the outside (no port forwarding at all)

I have a Telegram bot that i use to instruct my node-red to pull data from other devices in my lan and reply via telegram. This is working fine for texts (like status of door locks) and images (home security cameras).

Now I'd like to use a similar setup to have node-red to forward me an internal webpage from a device in my lan.

I tried two webshot nodes, hoping they could capture the page and send me the image via telegram as an image, but none worked.

I could pull the html into node-red, but I can't serve it (the RPi is not forwarded) and I don't think i can pass a complete webpage via Telegram.

I also looked if there are screenshot standalone scripts that run on a RPi, that I could trigger from node-red (so i could grab the image it would generate and forward via telegram) but didn't find any.

Would anybody have a suggestion how to tackle this project?

Thanks in advance for any ideas...
Rufus MapQuest

1 Like
2

What kind of html is it ? Does it have links to images and other pages that are only accessible from your lan ?

3

This sounds like it might be the wrong tool for the job. Have you considered using VPN instead of node red and telegram?
I use OpenVPN. When I enable it on my phone/laptop, I have access to everything on my internal network, no matter where I am. Since it (by default) routes all traffic encrypted through my home server, this also means I can use untrusted wifi.

4

Have you opened an issue on the github pages of the two nodes you tried? It might be an easy fix for the author and would benefit others in the community

5

You need to select just the important parts of the HTML and simplify it - Telegram doesn't support full html.