- Digital Signage with archlinux|ARM and Raspberry Pi
- What is RaspiSignage?
- Prerequisites
- Preparing for a player setup (client)
- Preparing for a CMS/server setup (optional)
- Running the scripts to prepare the SD card (on your Linux box) - Video 1
- Running scripts after first boot (on the Pi) - Video 2 - Video 3
- Changing the URL the player shows
- Additional features/options
- Troubleshooting
RaspiSignage is a set of scripts and configuration files to create a Digital Signage Player and/or a Digital Signage Server on a Raspberry Pi (Pi 3B+ or newer) using archlinux|ARM. Client and Server can but don't need to run on the same machine.
The player runs Firefox or Chromium on top of Fluxbox in full screen and displays the URL you specified.
The (optional) server is a LAMP stack running a wordpress blog with a set of plugins (mainly Foyer and Theater) that provide the option to create
- Slides
- Channels
- Displays
Slides can be added to channels. Channels can be added to displays and displays have their unique URL which can then be played by our player. The main goal was to create an easy to manage Digital Signage solution where "normal" people can upload files and create content by just using the easy to understand Wordpress UI.
An enduser documentation (german) describing how to use the backend can be found in documentation_DE/signage_de_endbenutzer_anleitung.md
You own the solution you build. No online services or subscriptions are involved!
For the player or the server you need:
- a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or newer (512MB RAM is sufficient)
- 4GB SD card (or larger)
The setup has been tested on a RaspberryPi 3B+ with 512MB RAM and a RaspberryPi 4 with 1GB RAM.
Clone this repo to your Linux computer (will not work on Windows!) and cd into the subfolder raspisignage.
$ git clone https://github.com/boschkundendienst/raspisignage.git
Cloning into 'raspisigage'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 122, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (122/122), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (102/102), done.
remote: Total 122 (delta 52), reused 73 (delta 19), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (122/122), 6.82 MiB | 7.88 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (52/52), done.
$ cd raspisignage
$
Then edit the configuration files
00-a_client.conf # main configuration file
00-b_wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf # to setup WiFi connection
00-c_wlan0.conf # IP settings for Wifi (DHCP=default)
00-d_eth0.conf # IP settings for Ethernet (DHCP=default)
using your favorite editor.
Before you edit this file, insert the SD card into your Linux machine and use the command dmesg -w to determine the device name. Names like /dev/mmcblk are often used if your machine has a built in SD card reader and the SD card is often named /dev/sdX if you use an external SD card reader.
The value is needed for 00-a_client.conf to build the correct names to create and access partition 1 and partition 2 of the SD card. The variable mydrive will be used to find out the correct partition naming and mydrivesuff will be automatically set accordingly in 00-a_client.conf to reflect the correct partition naming in your machine.
Example 1 (SD card is /dev/sde)
mydrive='/dev/sde'
# mydrivesuff will calculated as '' and 1 or 2 will be added automatically
will result in /dev/sde1 and /dev/sde2 which is correct to use this drive with the scripts.
Example 2 (SD card is /dev/mmcblk0)
mydrive='/dev/mmcblk0'
# mydrivesuff will be calculated as 'p' # 1 or 2 will be added automatically
will result in /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/mmcblk0p2 which is correct to use this drive with the scripts.
The rest of the file 00-a_client.conf is self explaining. The only other variables you should maybe change are the myhostname and the myopenurl variables. They will assign the hostname to your Raspberry Pi and set the URL that will be automatically opened by the player in full screen.
Here are all the default entries from 00-a_client.conf which should work out of the box for a Raspberry Pi 4 located in Germany.
mydrive='/dev/mmcblk0'
mydlurl='http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-rpi-4-latest.tar.gz'
myoutputfile='./ArchLinuxARM-rpi.tar.gz'
mykbdlayout='de-latin1-nodeadkeys'
myregion='Europe'
mycity='Berlin'
myhostname='signage01' # this is the hostname the Pi will get
myntps='0.de.pool.ntp.org server 1.de.pool.ntp.org server 2.de.pool.ntp.org server 3.de.pool.ntp.org'
mylang='de_DE.UTF-8'
mycoll='C'
mycs='de_DE'
mydisv6='y'
myenawifi='y'
myopenurl='https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/'
If you don't need Wifi, you can skip editing this file. It is already prefilled with a sample network{} section. You have to add your own Wifi SSID and Wifi Password to the file.
The necessary network section can easily be generated with:
$ wpa_passphrase yourssid yourpassword
The command will create an output like this:
network={
ssid="yourssid"
#psk="yourpassword"
psk=bd9abb43d0e2dd30bd92049f926debe09fc87c8eb18f1bdabe8e17453020bfa6
}
You could also use the Raspberry Pi Wifi Config Generator, a cool online tool to generate the above network section.
Just add the section you created at the end of 00-b_wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf and the Pi will later automatically connect to your Wifi network.
For more information about the syntax take a look at the ArchWiki (wpa_supplicant).
This file contains the IP settings for the built-in WiFi adapter. If you want to use DHCP or don't want to use Wifi you can leave it as is.
For more information about the possible configuration options take a look athe the ArchWiki (systemd-networkd)
This file contains the IP settings for the built-in LAN adapter. If you want to use DHCP or don't want to use Ethernet you can leave it as is.
For more information about the possible configuration options take a look at the the ArchWiki (systemd-networkd)
If you just want to build a Digital Signage Player that opens the URL specified with myopenurl you can continue with the section Running the installation scripts
Before running srv_rootafterboot.bash on the Pi, make sure that it either has a fixed IP or always receives the identical IP from the DHCP server since the IP address will be used in configuration files. If (for whatever reason) the IP address changes, you have to re-run srv_rootafterboot.bash again. It will update the necessary files with the new IP and !! also reset the password for the user dsadmin, so watch the output for the new password. !!
For the server part (running a wordpress CMS standalone or besides the player) follow the instructions for the player but additionally also edit the file 00-zsrv_rootafterboot.bash. This file will be copied to /root/srv_rootafterboot.bash to the Pi, so it is even possible to edit it later directly on the Pi if you currently don't know if the Pi should become a "server" or not.
While the defaults should work out of the box, feel free to change the following variables at the beginning of the script 00-zsrv_rootafterboot.bash to your needs:
db='dsdatabase'
dbuser='dswpuser'
dbpass='' # will be generated if not set
dbhost='localhost'
wptitle='dsserver'
wpadmin='dsadmin'
wpadminpass='' # will be generated if not set
wpadminemail='some@none.com'
wplocale='de_DE'
wppath='/srv/http'
If you leave dbpass and wpadminpass empty, a password will be generated automatically when we manually execute this script later on the Pi. The created passwords will be displayed to you in the final setup message!
This part of the setup needs to be executed on your Linux box. It will not work on Windows and has been tested mainly using archlinux but should work with Ubuntu (18.04+ with bsdtar installed), too. It should also work on most other Linux distros. On Ubuntu 20.04 you have to install the package libarchive-tools to get bsdtar installed.
After setting everything up in the configuration files we execute a set of scripts to automatically download archlinux|ARM, partition the SD card, write the rootfs to the SD card and preconfigure the system on the SD card. Execute the scripts in the following order:
$ ./01-download.bash
$ ./02-partitioning.bash
$ ./03-write-rootfs-to-sdcard.bash
$ ./04-preconfigure-system.bash
When the scripts are finished, you can remove the SD card from your computer and put it into your Raspberry Pi. Connect the PI to your TV using HDMI and power it up. It should startup and should be reachable via network. The built-in SSH server should be up and running, too. To find your PI on your network, the following command can help:
$ sudo nmap 192.168.178.0/24 -p 22 | grep -B 5 'Raspberry'
replace 192.168.178.0/24 with the correct values for your network!
The following video shows the entire setup process until here:
Assuming your Pi is booted up and you are logged in as the user alarm either via SSH or locally using the default credentials:
Default Credentials archlinux|ARM
U: alarm
P: alarm
U: root
P: root
You should now see the following message:
Welcome to Arch Linux ARM
Website: http://archlinuxarm.org
Forum: http://archlinuxarm.org/forum
IRC: #archlinux-arm on irc.Freenode.net
[alarm@signage01 ~]$
Become root by executing su - and use the default password root.
[alarm@signage01 ~]$ su -
Password:
[root@signage01 ~]#
You will automatically jump to roots home folder /root where we already placed the scripts rootafterboot.bash and srv_rootafterboot.bash.
Now execute either
rootafterboot.bash # to make this machine a player
srv_rootafterboot.bash # to make this machine a server with wordpress CMS
or both scripts if you want to place client and server on the same machine. If you have not yet configured the variables in srv_rootafterboot.bash you can also do that now.
The execution of the script rootafterboot.bash which makes the Pi a DS player is shown in this video:
The execution of the script srv_rootafterboot.bash which makes the Pi a DS Server (CMS) is shown in this video:
The script provided the credentials and URL to login to the Wordpress backend. Log in and continue with your setup using the Foyer plugin within Wordpress!
If you need to change the URL that the player shows with the full screen browser, just edit the file /home/alarm/.fluxbox/startup as the user alarm and change value of the variable url to the new url:
url='http://thenewurl.com/test'
After the change become root with su - and restart the browser with systemctl restart lightdm.
Do never edit files in /home/alarm when you are the user root or you will mess up file and folder permissions!
The default browser (viewer) for the player is Chromium because it uses about 150MB less RAM than Firefox. The setup is prepared to switch to Firefox very easily. You can either switch to Firefox before deploying to the SD card or afterwards directly on the Pi.
before SD card preparation
Search for the following section in 00-zrootafterboot.bash
########################################################################
# START BROWSER
########################################################################
Change
# Chromium in kiosk mode with url (make sure there is an '&' at the end
/usr/bin/chromium --disable-breakpad --start-fullscreen --incognito --no-first-run --disable-session-crashed-bubble --temp-profile --disable-infobars --noerrdialogs --noerrors --kiosk \$url &
to
# Chromium in kiosk mode with url (make sure there is an '&' at the end
#/usr/bin/chromium --disable-breakpad --start-fullscreen --incognito --no-first-run --disable-session-crashed-bubble --temp-profile --disable-infobars --noerrdialogs --noerrors --kiosk \$url &
and accordingly change
########################################################################
# START BROWSER
########################################################################
# Firefox in kiosk mode with url (make sure there is an '&' at the end
# Firefox needs ~150MB more RAM
#/usr/lib/firefox/firefox --kiosk \$url &
to
########################################################################
# START BROWSER
########################################################################
# Firefox in kiosk mode with url (make sure there is an '&' at the end
# Firefox needs ~150MB more RAM
/usr/lib/firefox/firefox --kiosk \$url &
In a nutshell: "Disable the start of Chromium and enable start of Firefox."
after SD card preparation
If you want to switch to Firefox as the default viewer for the player after deploying the SD card you have to do it directly on the Pi (logged in locally or via SSH) as user alarm.
Open the file /home/alarm/.fluxbox/startup and make the same changes as described in before SD card preparation, just in a different file.
After the change either reboot the Pi or execute systemctl restart lightdm as user root for the changes to take affect.
rootafterboot.bash
You can at any time re-run this script on the Pi. It should make no problems.
cleanup.bash
This script is automatically generated during the execution of srv_rootafterboot.bash. It can be used to remove the entire wordpress database and delete all files and folders in webroot (as specified with wppath usually /srv/http). You can use it if you want to re-run srv_rootafterboot.bash and start with a total blank instance of wordpress. I used it a lot during my tests.
srv_rootafterboot.bash
You can at any time re-run this script on the Pi. Depending on your configuration it might re-generate the passwords for the database and Wordpress administrator but will show the changes after it ran. Your previous installation of wordpress should stay the same if you did not change any variables in srv_rootafterboot.bash since the first run.
Maybe you invested a lot of time in setting things up and you want to create a full backup of the installation on the Pi. While most documentations would encourage you to use dd and create a full disk image of the installation, we could go a much easier way.
- Stop MariaDB service (if installed) with
systemctl stop mariadb - Stop lightdm service (if installed) with
systemctl stop lightdm - gzip the entire
/folder to a remote host using SSH by excluding some special directories
Look at the following example to get a clue:
# remote : 192.168.1.24
# remotefile: /home/pcfreak/p4-dsclient-backup.tar.gz
$ tar --exclude='/run/*' \
--exclude='/dev/*' \
--exclude='/sys/*' \
--exclude='/tmp/*' \
--exclude='/mnt/*' \
--exclude='/proc/*' \
--exclude='/media/*' \
--exclude='/var/run/*' \
--exclude='/var/lock/*' \
--exclude='.gvfs' \
--exclude='lost+found' \
-zcf - / | ssh user@192.168.1.24 'cat - > "/home/user/raspisignage/p4-dsclient-backup.tar.gz"'
The cool thing is, that you (as experienced Linux user) can now specify p4-dsclient-backup.tar.gz as myoutputfile in 00-a_client.conf and use only the scripts 02-partitioning.bash and 03-write-rootfs-to-sdcard.bash to create a clone of the SD card without using dd. That saves a lot of time to deploy your next player or server!
During the wordpress installation the plugin All in One WP Security & Firewall has been installed. You can access it from the wordpress admin interface. It has a ton of cool security settings and an option to backup the wordpress instance (including the database) locally or remote. Some additional minor tweaks to the system might be necessary for some features (like sending backups via email) to work.
The installation routine does some folder linkage to point most temporary folders Chromium or Firefox uses to /dev/shm/chromium or /dev/shm/mozilla. /dev/shm is the built in Linux RAMDisk. Using it speeds things up and avoids unnecessary writes to the SD card.
If you have no monitor available and want to test your setup remotely consider using a VNC server as described here.
The subfolder build_mlbrowser contains the script build_mlbrowser.bash that let's you build mlbrowser for the Raspberry Pi. After compilation you can use mlbrowser to start a browser using the framebuffer like this:
mlbrowser -z 1 -platform linuxfb https://github.com/boschkundendienst/raspisignageFor troubleshooting tips look in the troubleshooting/README.md