Raspberry Pi autostart

How to Autostart MisterHouse when a Pi boots

Using systemctl

This is based on the technique described here

1. create a misterhouse.service file for your service, in a locaion of your choice e.g. /home/pi/mh/misterhouse.service for example:

[Unit]
Description=Misterhouse
Requires=rpcbind.service
After=rpcbind.service

[Service]
Environment="mh_params=/home/pi/mh/mh.private.ini"
Type=simple
ExecStart=/opt/misterhouse/mh.sh 
Restart=on-abort

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Where mh.private.ini is your private mh.ini file

Copy this file into /etc/systemd/system as root, for example:

sudo cp /home/pi/mh/misterhouse.service /etc/systemd/system/misterhouse.service

Next create the shell command to actually run MisterHouse /opt/misterhouse/mh.sh in this example;

#!/bin/sh
# this is the script that starts MisterHouse on startup, it lives in /opt/misterhouse
# set up environmnt
export mh_parms=/home/pi/mh/mh.private.ini
# Save the old log file in case there was a crash
cp -f /opt/misterhouse/mh.log /opt/misterhouse/mh.old.log
# The next line starts mh
/home/pi/mh/mh/bin/mh > /opt/misterhouse/mh.log 2>&1 

Check that you can write to the mh.log file

sudo touch /opt/misterhouse/mh.log
sudo chown pi:pi /opt/misterhouse/mh.log
touch /opt/misterhouse/mh.log

Make /opt/misterhouse/mh.sh executable and check that it starts MisterHouse correctly for your environment;

sudo chmod +x /opt/misterhouse/mh.sh
/opt/misterhouse/mh.sh

Now check that the systemctl can start and stop your new service

sudo systemctl start misterhouse.service
sudo systemctl stop misterhouse.service

Now enable it to autostart

sudo systemctl enable misterhouse.service

Method 2 using an lxterminal window

• Create a directory called /home/pi/.config/autostart
• Create a file called /home/pi/.config/autostart/mh.desktop</span>
• Edit mh.desktop to contain the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=lxterminal --command 'bash -c "sudo /home/pi/MisterHouse/mhl; exec bash"'

• The Exec line above is more complicated than I would like but it seems to be the only way to get MisterHouse to start in an lxterminal window that doesn't close when MisterHouse is quit or terminated with ctrl-C. This is accomplished by running 'exec bash' as a second command after 'mhl' exits. If you don't want the lxterminal window to remain open if mhl exits, you can use Exec=lxterminal --command 'sudo /home/pi/MisterHouse/mhl instead.

• Run sudo reboot from a terminal to restart the Pi.

• If MisterHuse doesn't start after reboot, check the contents of the /home/pi/.xsession-errors file for clues.