Friday, April 19, 2013

Running a script at startup with Raspberry Pi and Raspbian

First of all, I'm sorry for the lack of updates. I've been very busy with teaching and grading. Plus, my research is not leading me to discover new libraries or programming models, so I have nothing to write here.
Lately, I've been working with deploying my Raspberry Pi integrated with some sensors. I wanted to a robust deployment, but how to do that? Should I bring my monitor wherever I want to deploy the Pi to set it up?
Luckily there is a very easy way to do that. In this way, whatever happens (like power supply unplugged), whenever the Pi is turned on again, it will start again what it was doing, effectively removing the need of connecting it to a screen and a mouse/keyboard.
The procedure is very simple: the idea is to add a script to the /etc/init.d/ path as many of the scripts running at booting runs from there. Here's an example:

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/myscript
#

# do something like running your node.js server or client!
cd mystuff/mynodeserver/
node my_server.js

exit 0

Once you save this file in the location specified before, you should make it executable. I usually run  chmod 777 myfile.sh but some people prefer to give just the root the power to execute that, so they call chmod with 755 instead.
Once this is done, you just have to update the symbolic link to make the script execute at startup and that's it! To update them just run update-rc.d myscript default.
To remove it, run update-rc.d -f myscript remove.
And it is as simple as that. I hope I helped somebody with this little trick!


Categories:

2 comments:

  1. My next question would be, how do you boot chromium inside of init.d?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I admit, I have not been on web page in a long time.however it was another joy to see It is such an important topic and ignored by so many, even professionals. professionals. I thank you to help making people more aware of possible issues. golden gate ventures

    ReplyDelete