autostart kiosk on startup

[BrendanBall]

What is the recommended way to autostart grafana-kiosk? If it's systemd can we add a template service file to the repo? I've tried setting it up with the following:

[Unit]
Description=Grafana Kiosk

[Service]
User=pi
Environment="DISPLAY=:0"
Environment="XAUTHORITY=/home/pi/.Xauthority"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/grafana-kiosk --URL <url>  -login-method local -username <username> -password <password> -playlist true

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

This works, except that in the UI chrome complains with a big banner: You are using an unsupported command-line flag: --no-sandbox. Stability and security will suffer. This doesn't come up when I run the same grafana-kiosk command just in command line via ssh.
The blog post was semi helpful, but it is kinda frustrating that it doesn't include how to do the full setup and just ignores the fact that you'd want this to be autostarted

EDIT: the chrome issue is because the service was running as root. I edited it to specify to run the service as the user pi and it works now. Can we add this service file to the repo?

[briangann]

great idea, let me try this out

[michaelp85]

This won't be a reliable way to do it, you're not necessarily guaranteed that the display and window manager will be ready in time. For example for me on slow hardware this wasn't working and was having weird issues like resolution issues.

Better method would be to use your appropriate window manager startup scripts, for me this is; but for others may be xinitrc or similar. This will only fire once window manager is ready and waiting.

/home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

@xset s noblank
@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@sleep 10
@/usr/bin/grafana-kiosk.linux.armv7 -URL https://xxx.grafana.net/ -login-method gcom -username xxxx -password xxxxxx --kiosk-mode full

[BrendanBall]

For some reason I didn't get a notification, anyway thanks for the response. @michaelp85 I'm using freedesktop autostart as mentioned in the lxde wiki along with the grafana-kiosk -lxde option which does most of the options you specified with xset according to issue 9. So I just put the following file in /home/pi/.config/autostart/grafana-kiosk.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/bin/grafana-kiosk -lxde ...other arguments

which seems to work. The kiosk has been freezing which I was fixing by just restarting the systemd service, but not sure what made it freeze so will see what happens with this way of running it.

[briangann]

The above methods and a couple more have been added to the documentation, many thanks to everyone! See PR #22 and the new section https://github.com/grafana/grafana-kiosk#automatic-startup