Installation Documentation Modbus-Proxy

[ChristophCaina]

As mentioned in the QA Discussion "connection issues with the inverter #117" you should consider the installation of a Modbus-Proxy if you want to connect multiple devices / clients with your SolarEdge Inverter.

With the Modbus-Proxy options listed in the discussion topic, there are two ways:

1. Using the HomeAssistant Addon
   Pros:

• Easy installation and setup
  Cons:
• If your HomeAssistant does not run or your addon failes (for what ever reason) - the other clients won't get any data, too.

2. Using a dedicated machine for the Modbus-Proxy
   Pros:

• Independend from your HomeAssistant
• No additional "Load" due to running addons on your HA Host
  Cons:
• slightly more difficult to install & maintain
• not running as a service by default

I had the Modbus-Proxy running as an Addon in HomeAssistant for quite a while - and so far, everything was working as expected.
But recently, I've decided to rebuild my environment - and move all (ok, at least most) HomeAssistant addons to their own Containers on my Proxmox machine - to prevent any issues if HomeAssistant should fail to start or the machine would crash.

With this installation guide, I want to share some of the steps I did to get the modbus proxy installed and running as a service.

Why running Modbus-Proxy as a service?

But why do I want to run the application as a Service?

By default, it is an application which requires to be executed manually.
In case of a reboot or for maintenance reasons, I don't want to connect to my host and start the software.
Especially in this case, where my wallbox requires the information from the inverter - it is a requirement that the wallbox does receives the data reliable...

So, after following the basic installation steps provided in the readme of the Modbus-Proxy
(https://github.com/tiagocoutinho/modbus-proxy) you can follow this guide to create a systemd service from your installation.

setup systemd

1. move your configuration file from the folder given in the installation guide to another location:
   for example to /usr/lib/mproxy-conf.yaml
2. go to /etc/systemd/system/
3. use nano or any text editor you prefer to create a service file nano mproxy.service
4. the file should contain the following information:

[Unit]
Description=Modbus-Proxy
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
ExecStart = modbus-proxy -c ./usr/lib/mproxy-conf.yaml

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

5. run systemctl daemon-reload to reload your systemd daemon, so that it can load your new service script
6. run systemctl enable mproxy.service to enable your new service
7. run systemctl start mproxy.service to start your modbus-proxy service.

it will then run in the background and you can still work in the console without getting a bunch of log-output from the software.

This allows you, to maintain the host - and do other things, while the modbus proxy is running.
To stop the service, you just run the command systemctly stop mproxy.service

To disable the service (if no longer required) just use systemctl disable mproxy.service