Web Greeter for LightDM

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

This is a try to update the Antergos web-greeter, following what they left.

As this is based on the master release, which does some API changes, actual themes would need to do changes to work correctly.

Checkout 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

Download from the latest release and install with apt.

apt install ./web-greeter-VER.deb

Dependencies

	arch	ubuntu	fedora	openSUSE
liblightdm-gobject	lightdm	liblightdm-gobject-dev	lightdm-gobject-devel	liblightdm-gobject-1-0
pygobject	python-gobject	python3-gi	pygobject3	python3-gobject
pyqt5	python-pyqt5	python3-pyqt5	python3-qt5	python3-qt5
qt5-webengine	qt5-webengine	libqt5webengine5	qt5-qtwebengine	libqt5-qtwebengine
gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection	gobject-introspection

Build dependencies

• rsync
• zip
• make
• pyrcc5 (Should be installed with above dependencies)
• cx_freeze (and patchelf) (Optional)

PIP

• PyGObject
• PyQt5
• PyQtWebEngine
• ruamel.yaml
• python-xlib

Install PIP dependencies with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

NOTE Be sure to install pip libraries as root too, or use a venv to install these dependencies

Download & Install

git clone https://github.com/JezerM/web-greeter.git
cd web-greeter
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
sudo make install

This will build and install web-greeter in a zippy way, which compresses the python code as a zip and uses it as a binary. Either sudo make install_freeze to build and install with cx_freeze. The zippy method depends on the actual python interpreter and its libraries, so you could have problems when updating python or removing any dependency, while the cx_freeze method tries to fix this "problem".

See latest release.

Theme JavaScript API

Antergos documentation is no longer available, although it is accesible through Web Archive. Current and updated documentation is available at gh-pages.

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.

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

npm install nody-greeter-types

Enable features

Brightness control

To control the brightness inside the greeter, I recommend to use acpilight replacement for xbacklight.

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

If you don't want to or don't have a compatible device, disable it inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml (disabled by default)

Battery status

acpi is the only tool you need (and a battery).

You can disable it inside /etc/lightdm/web-greeter.yml (disabled by default)

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

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
• Run lightdm --test-mode. Although it's not supported, 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.