Make Glances run automatically after Raspberry Pi reboot

Run Glances at RBPI startup

If you’re reading this on fediverse and the layout is off, here’s the link to the original blog post with a nice text & pictures layout.

In my previous post, I struggled to run glances on my Raspberry Pi Zero W. After a first reboot I stared to my Home Assistant dashboard and wondered where is the data from my RaspberryPi. Of course, I ran it manually from the shell, it didn’t restart by itself.

If you ask me to tell you out of my head how to make a service/script start after a reboot, I will stare you blank.

After a bit of googling, I found out there are at least 4 different ways to do it.

Firstly, I tried to make glances to start using crontab method:

sudo crontab -e

#then I added the following command to crontab:

@reboot sh /<path to my glances>/glances -w

It failed, don’t know why, maybe because Raspbian doesn’t like @restart command.

Second try – rc.local:

I tinkered a bit with rc.local but I gave up quickly.

Third try – systemd – it worked!

1. Go to systemd directory

cd /etc/systemd/system

2. create a definition file for the service

sudo nano glances_w.service

3. Add the following text to glances_w.service file:

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Unit]
Description=Glances Web Server
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=tomi
Group=adm
ExecStart=/home/tomi/glances/bin/glances -w
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 10
Type=simple

[Timer]
OnStartupSec=25

Change parameter User (tomi) to your user and ExecStart (/home/tomi/glances/bin/glances -w) with path to your glances start command.

4. Enable and start service

sudo systemctl enable glances_w.service

sudo systemctl start glances_w.service

5. Check the status of the service

systemctl status glances_w.service

It should give you something like:

Thanks to this forum post – now my glances start autmatically after a reboot. Of course it didn’t go smoothly as described above. I had to tinker with the User and Group parameter. I didn’t know which user should I insert. Then I didn’t know the name of the group.

So I had to find it out using:

groups

groups tomi

The bottom line is: without forums and manuals for linux commands, I’d be completely disabled when using linux. I’m using it on and off for 30 years, but still struggling with basic commands. I wonder if I will ever climb above my current level: google-the-command-copy-paste-modify-repeat

Tags: #homeasistant #glances #raspberrypi #systemd