Access your deployed application

Let’s learn the ways to reach an application running on your device with SPEKTRA Edge.

Once you deploy an application, its containers run on the device and publish ports according to your Docker compose file. How you reach those ports depends on where you are relative to the device. This page covers the three common cases:

1. From your workstation, anywhere — through the platform’s secure port forwarding (no inbound ports open on the device).
2. From the device’s local network — directly to a published port.
3. From another container — service-to-service inside the same application.

services:
  app:
    image: nginx:alpine
    ports:
    - 8000:8000

From your workstation (port forwarding)

This is the recommended way to reach an application on a remote device. It works from anywhere, over the device’s existing outbound connection to the platform, so no inbound ports need to be open on the device or its network.

You need the cuttle CLI installed for this method.

1. Open the application’s Application overview page in the dashboard (see Monitor & control).
2. Click Copy port forward as Cuttle command to copy a ready-made command.
3. Run it in your local terminal. For example:

cuttle devices forward-port \
  projects/your-project/regions/us-west2/devices/your-device \
  8000 tcp://127.0.0.1:8000

This forwards the device’s port 8000 to 127.0.0.1:8000 on your machine. Point your browser at http://localhost:8000 and you’ll reach the application as if it were running locally.

The first argument is the full device name (it includes the project and region); the dashboard fills this in for you when you copy the command.

From the device’s local network

If your client (a browser, another machine, a PLC, etc.) is on the same local network as the device, you can reach a published port directly using the device’s IP address:

http://<device-ip>:<published-port>

For the Nginx example above, that would be http://<device-ip>:8000.

This is the natural choice when the application is meant to serve other equipment on-site — for example, a local dashboard, an API consumed by nearby machines, or a gateway service.

A few things to keep in mind:

• The port must be published in the compose file (the ports entry). A container port that isn’t published is only reachable from inside the device.
• By default a published port is reachable on all of the device’s network interfaces. If you only want it on a specific interface, bind it explicitly in the compose file, for example 127.0.0.1:8000:8000 to keep it on the device itself.
• Make sure the chosen host port doesn’t collide with another application or a system service on the device.

From another container

Containers within the same application can talk to each other over the application’s internal network using their service name as the hostname — they don’t need to publish ports for this. For example, an app service can reach a redis service at redis:6379.

Only publish a port (with ports) when something outside the application needs to reach the container. Internal service-to-service traffic should stay on the internal network.

Persisting data behind your application

If your application stores data (uploads, a database, configuration), mount it under the device’s persistent data area so it survives restarts and power cycles:

services:
  app:
    image: nginx:alpine
    ports:
    - 8000:8000
    volumes:
    - /isodevice/data/nginx/conf.d:/etc/nginx/conf.d

See Configuration for a full walk-through of mounting configuration and host volumes.

Which method should I use?

Next step

Learn how to monitor and control your application — view its status, metrics, and logs — from the SPEKTRA Edge dashboard.