Web Greeter for LightDM on FreeBSD

A modern, visually appealing greeter for LightDM, that allows to create web based themes with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

This is a try to update the Antergos web-greeter, following what they left.

As this is based on the master release, which does some API changes, actual themes would need to do changes to work correctly.

Checkout nody-greeter, a greeter made in Node.js with Electron! (Actually, faster than Web Greeter)

See Live Demo

Gruvbox and Dracula themes!

Features

• Create themes with HTML, CSS and JavaScript!
• Should work everywhere.
• JavaScript error handling, allowing to load the default theme.
• Themes could be simple, or very complex.
• Battery and brightness control.
• Tab completion for zsh and bash.

Available distro packages

Arch

• AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/web-greeter/

yay -S web-greeter

Ubuntu

Download from the latest release and install with apt.

apt install ./web-greeter-VER.deb

FreeBSD

clone the repository and run the following command as superuser:

make install

Dependencies

FreeBSD	arch	ubuntu	fedora	openSUSE	debian
lightdm	lightdm	liblightdm-gobject-1-dev	lightdm-gobject-devel	liblightdm-gobject-1-0	liblightdm-gobject-dev
py38-gobject3	python-gobject	python3-gi	pygobject3	python3-gobject	python3-gi
py38-qt5	python-pyqt5	python3-pyqt5	python3-qt5	python3-qt5	python3-pyqt5
py38-qt5-webengine	python-pyqt5-webengine	python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine	python3-qt5-webengine	python3-qtwebengine	python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine
py38-ruamel.yaml	python-ruamel-yaml	python3-ruamel.yaml	python3-ruamel-yaml	python3-ruamel-yaml	python3-ruamel.yaml
py38-pyinotify	python-pyinotify	python3-pyinotify	python3-inotify	python3-inotify	python3-pyinotify
	qt5-webengine	libqt5webengine5	qt5-qtwebengine	libqt5-qtwebengine	libqt5webengine5
	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection
	libxcb	libxcb1-dev	libxcb-devel	libxcb	libxcb1-dev
	libx11	libx11-dev	libX11-devel	libx11	libx11-dev

Note: web-greeter does not work in Fedora. See #19

Build dependencies

• rsync
• make (GNU Version)
• pyrcc5 (Should be installed with above dependencies)
• base-devel (build-essential)

PIP

• PyGObject
• PyQt5
• PyQtWebEngine
• ruamel.yaml
• pyinotify

PIP dependencies are no longer required as long as common dependencies are satisfied. However, you can install PIP dependencies with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

NOTE If using PIP, be sure to install these dependencies as root. Yet, no recommended.

Download & Install

git clone https://github.com/JezerM/web-greeter.git
cd web-greeter
sudo make install

This will build web-greeter and package all the files to be installed.

See latest release.

Uninstall

Use sudo make uninstall to uninstall web-greeter, but preserving web-greeter.yml and themes. Either, use sudo make uninstall_all to remove everting related to web-greeter.

Theme JavaScript API

Antergos documentation is no longer available, although it is accesible through Web Archive. Current and updated documentation is available at gh-pages.

You can access the man-pages man web-greeter for some documentation and explanation. Also, you can explore the provided themes for real use cases.

Aditionally, you can install the TypeScript types definitions inside your theme with npm:

npm install nody-greeter-types

Aditional features

Brightness control

acpi is the only tool needed to control the brightness, besides a compatible device. This functionality is based on acpilight replacement for xbacklight.

udev rules are needed to be applied before using it, check acpilight rules. Then, lightdm will need to be allowed to change backlight values, to do so add lightdm user to video group: sudo usermod -a -G video lightdm

Enable it inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml

Battery status

acpi and acpi_listen are the only tools you need (and a battery). This functionality is based on "bat" widget from "lain" awesome-wm library.

You can enable it inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml

Debugging

You can run the greeter from within your desktop session if you add the following line to the desktop file for your session located in /usr/local/xsessions/: X-LightDM-Allow-Greeter=true.

You have to log out and log back in after adding that line. Then you can run the greeter from command line.

Themes can be opened with a debug console if you set debug_mode as true inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml. Or, you could run the web-greeter with the parameter --debug. I recommend to use the last one, as it is easier and handy.

web-greeter --debug

Check web-greeter --help for more commands.

Note: Do not use lightdm --test-mode as it is not supported.

Troubleshooting

Before setting web-greeter as your LightDM Greeter, you should make sure it does work also with LightDM:

• Run web-greeter as root with --no-sandbox flag ("Unable to determine socket to daemon" and "XLib" related errors are expected)
• Run lightdm --test-mode. Although it's not supported, it could help to debug lightdm.

LightDM crashes and tries to recover over and over again

LightDM does this when the greeter crashes, so it could mean web-greeter was not installed correctly, or some dependencies were updated/removed after a distro update.

Import errors

If you see something like this: ImportError: libQt5WebEngineCore.so.5: undefined symbol: _ZNSt12out_of_rangeC1EPKc, version Qt_5, check out this StackOverflow response.

With some PyQt5 import errors like ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets', check out this GitHub response.

web-greeter related import errors:

• AttributeError: module 'globals' has no attribute 'greeter' means some exception happened inside the Browser constructor, maybe related to LightDM or PyQt5.
• ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'resources' could mean path/to/web-greeter-clone/web-greeter/resources.py was not compiled with pyrcc5 in the build/install methods.