Can Beszel Agent be ran on a non-rooted Android phone?

[CaseyLabs]

I would love to monitor my phone's stats as well. Is it possible to run the Beszel Agent on a non-rooted Android phone?

I tried installing the agent in Termux, but encountered a "this script must be ran as root" error. When I tried downloading and running the binary, I got a "beszel-agent has unexpected e_type: 2" error.

[henrygd]

I haven't tried that yet, so I can't say for sure. I did find this comment from the termux team on reddit, though:

Termux from Google Play? If so, uninstall and reinstall from F-Droid or GitHub.

Google Play build doesn't support running static binaries anymore.

[CaseyLabs]

Oooh, I managed to make some progress by compiling the agent within Termux. Steps taken so far:

• Install Termux from F-Droid

• Run Termux

• Optional: install and connect to phone via SSH:

pkg install openssh
sshd
whoami  # (get username)

# On your desktop:
ssh -p 8022 username@ipadress

In the phone shell:

pkg install git
pkg install golang
git clone --branch v0.9.1 --depth 1 https://github.com/henrygd/beszel.git
cd beszel/beszel/cmd/agent
go build -ldflags "-w -s" .
mv agent beszel-agent
PORT=45876 KEY='myPublicSSHkey' ./beszel-agent

I can connect to the agent succesfully this way! However, it looks like I may need root access to get disk stats (or find another way to measure those metrics within Termux):

2025/01/13 20:47:46 ERROR Error getting disk partitions err="open /proc/filesystems: permission denied"
2025/01/13 20:47:46 ERROR Error getting diskstats err="open /proc/diskstats: permission denied"
2025/01/13 20:47:46 INFO Root disk mountpoint=/ io=/
2025/01/13 20:47:46 WARN Device not found in diskstats name=/
2025/01/13 20:47:46 INFO Starting SSH server address=:45876

PS: @henrygd - Thanks for making Beszel, I've really been enjoying its simplicity so far.

[henrygd]

Interesting, thanks for the update! I'll definitely test this out myself when I have more time.

[CaseyLabs]

Alrighty, I made a little bit more progress here (I'm new to Termux, so there was a bit of learning needed on my end):

In the phone's shell, we can add storage support with the following command:

termux-setup-storage

However, the permission errors to /proc still exist on a non-rooted phone. A quick search online suggests there may be a way to mock the filesystem, or that we may be able to get the disk stats in Go using something like this:

import (
    "golang.org/x/sys/unix"
)

func getDiskStats(path string) (uint64, uint64, error) {
    var stat unix.Statfs_t
    err := unix.Statfs(path, &stat)
    if err != nil {
        return 0, 0, err
    }

    // Total size
    total := stat.Blocks * uint64(stat.Bsize)
    // Free space
    free := stat.Bfree * uint64(stat.Bsize)

    return total, free, nil
}

I'll try to dig a bit more into this. cc: @henrygd

[henrygd]

I appreciate you looking into this!

We use gopsutil's disk package, so maybe something here could help: https://github.com/shirou/gopsutil/issues?q=android