Web Greeter

A LightDM greeter made with PyQt5

A modern, visually appealing greeter for LightDM, that allows to create web based themes with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

This is a fork of the Antergos web-greeter that tries to fix and improve this project for a modern and current use. Due to this, some API changes are needed, which implies that current themes would need to do changes to work correctly.

Also, check out nody-greeter, a greeter made in Node.js with Electron! (Actually, faster than Web Greeter)

See Live Demo

Gruvbox and Dracula themes!

Features

• Create themes with HTML, CSS and JavaScript!
• Should work everywhere.
• JavaScript error handling, allowing to load the default theme.
• Themes could be simple, or very complex.
• Battery and brightness control.
• Tab completion for zsh and bash.

Available distro packages

Arch

• AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/web-greeter/

yay -S web-greeter

Ubuntu/Debian

Download from the latest release and install with apt.

apt install ./web-greeter-VER-DISTRO.deb

Dependencies

Note: web-greeter does not work in Fedora. See #19

Build dependencies

• rsync
• make
• tsc (npm i -g typescript)
• pyrcc5 (Should be installed with above dependencies)
• base-devel (build-essential)

PIP

• PyGObject
• PyQt5
• PyQtWebEngine
• ruamel.yaml
• pyinotify

PIP dependencies are no longer required as long as common dependencies are satisfied. However, you can install PIP dependencies with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

NOTE If using PIP, be sure to install these dependencies as root. Yet, not recommended.

Download & Install

git clone --recursive https://github.com/JezerM/web-greeter.git
cd web-greeter
sudo make install

This will build web-greeter and package all the files to be installed.

See latest release.

Uninstall

Use sudo make uninstall to uninstall web-greeter, but preserving web-greeter.yml and themes. Either, use sudo make uninstall_all to remove everything related to web-greeter.

Theme JavaScript API

Antergos documentation is no longer available, although it is accesible through Web Archive. Current and updated documentation is available at web-greeter-page/docs.

You can access the man-pages man web-greeter for some documentation and explanation. Also, you can explore the provided themes for real use cases.

Additionally, you can install the TypeScript types definitions inside your theme with npm:

npm install nody-greeter-types

Additional features

Brightness control

acpi is the only tool needed to control the brightness, besides a compatible device. This functionality is based on acpilight replacement for xbacklight.

udev rules are needed to be applied before using it, check acpilight rules. Then, lightdm will need to be allowed to change backlight values, to do so add lightdm user to the video group: sudo usermod -a -G video lightdm

Enable it inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml

Battery status

acpi and acpi_listen are the only tools you need (and a battery). This functionality is based on "bat" widget from "lain" awesome-wm library.

You can enable it inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml

Debugging

You can run the greeter from within your desktop session if you add the following line to the desktop file for your session located in /usr/share/xsessions/: X-LightDM-Allow-Greeter=true.

You have to log out and log back in after adding that line. Then you can run the greeter from command line.

Themes can be opened with a debug console if you set debug_mode as true inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml. Or, you could run the web-greeter with the parameter --debug. I recommend to use the last one, as it is easier and handy.

web-greeter --debug

Check web-greeter --help for more commands.

Note: Do not use lightdm --test-mode as it is not supported.

Troubleshooting

Before setting web-greeter as your LightDM Greeter, you should make sure it does work also with LightDM:

• Run web-greeter as root with --no-sandbox flag ("Unable to determine socket to daemon" and "XLib" related errors are expected)
• Run lightdm --test-mode. Although it's not supported, if it does work then it could help to debug lightdm.

LightDM crashes and tries to recover over and over again

LightDM does this when the greeter crashes, so it could mean web-greeter was not installed correctly, or some dependencies were updated/removed after a distro update.

Import errors

If you see something like this: ImportError: libQt5WebEngineCore.so.5: undefined symbol: _ZNSt12out_of_rangeC1EPKc, version Qt_5, check out this StackOverflow response.

With some PyQt5 import errors like ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets', check out this GitHub response.

web-greeter related import errors:

• AttributeError: module 'globals' has no attribute 'greeter' means some exception happened inside the Browser constructor, maybe related to LightDM or PyQt5.
• ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'resources' could mean path/to/web-greeter-clone/web-greeter/resources.py was not compiled with pyrcc5 in the build/install methods.