…or How to Get a Script to Run Automatically at the Auto-login on default Raspberry Pi Raspbian Linux.
I want to get my FridgeGizmo that displays local weather and global tweets on an LCD display to start itself up automatically when I plug it in, with no user intervention. I tinkered around with .profile files, but I could only get them to run when I manually opened a terminal session (by SSH from my laptop, in my case). This is no good. I wanted the Raspberry Pi to run my script to send text to the LCD display (via the Arduino) when the Pi logs itself in to the normal LXDE graphical environment. I don’t want it to run too soon (at boot, for example) because I need to be sure that it’s connected to the internet and that Apache and PHP are running, as they are needed to make FridgeGizmo work.
Here’s how I did it…
I opened a terminal window (SSH in my case, but a root terminal window on the Pi screen should work too). I navigated to the home folder of the default user – pi – by typing
cd /home/pi
at the command line.
I then created a new file called auto.desktop by typing
sudo nano auto.desktop
at the command line.
Into this file I pasted the following text:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name= Connect
Comment=Checks internet connectivity
Exec=lxterminal --command "/var/www/tweetwx.sh"
Terminal=true
and saved it using ctrl-O, ctrl-X. /var/www/tweetwx.sh is the path to the shell script which calls the PHP file that pulls weather and tweets from the internet and sends them to the Arduino and its LCD display.
I then had to make a directory inside the /home/pi/.config folder to put this file in by typing in the root command window:
cd /home/pi/.config
mkdir autostart
I then moved my auto.desktop file in there by using this command:
cd /home/pi
mv auto.desktop .config/autostart/
I then rebooted the Raspberry Pi, connected to the screenless and keyboardless Arduino, and soon weather and tweets started appearing on the LCD with no human intervention. Yay!