WebengineKiosk

Launch and control a fullscreen web browser from Elixir. This is intended for kiosks running Nerves but can be used anywhere you need to show a user a local web-based UI.

Here's an example run:

iex> {:ok, kiosk} = WebengineKiosk.start_link(fullscreen: false)
iex> WebengineKiosk.go_to_url(kiosk, "https://elixir-lang.org/")
iex> WebengineKiosk.run_javascript(Display, "window.alert('Hello, Elixir!')")
iex> WebengineKiosk.stop(kiosk)

It can also be linked into your application's supervision tree:

# Example childspecs

   [
      {WebengineKiosk, {[homepage: "https://somewhere.com", background: "black"], name: MyKiosk}}
   ]

# Somewhere else in your code

WebengineKiosk.run_javascript(Display, "window.alert('Hello, Elixir!')")

Kiosk options

Doc all of the options here!

Installation

WebengineKiosk requires Qt version 5.10 or later (it may work on earlier versions, but we haven't tested it). It is likely that your package manager already has a Qt package.

On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt install qtwebengine5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev qt5-default

On OSX:

brew install qt

If you are installing Qt manually, then the first time that you run mix, you'll need to point to the installation location. If you don't, you'll either get an error that qmake isn't found or you'll being using your system's version of Qt. Here's an example commandline:

QMAKE=~/Qt/5.11.1/gcc_64/bin/qmake mix compile

Finally, if you're using Nerves, you'll need a Nerves system that includes Qt. Take a look at kiosk_system_rpi3 for an example.

Once you've done all that, go ahead and add webengine_kiosk to your mix.exs dependencies like normal:

def deps do
  [
    {:webengine_kiosk, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Permissions

WebengineKiosk will refuse to run as the root user. You may specify a name or number using the :uid and :gid parameters to WebengineKiosk.start_link/2. If unspecified and running as root, WebengineKiosk will try to drop to a kiosk user and kiosk group by default. If dropping privileges, then you also need to ensure that QtWebEngine has a writable data directory. Use the :data_dir option do do this.

The next set of permissions to check are platform-specific. Qt and Chromium directly access videos drivers and input devices. Usually the device files associated with those have group permissions and adding the user to the appropriate groups makes everything work. For example, on the Raspberry Pi, you'll need the kiosk user to be part of the video and input groups. You may also need to update the permissions and group ownership on /dev/vchiq if running on Nerves since it doesn't yet do that by default.

Debugging immediate exits

If the kiosk binary exits immediately then something basic is wrong. Unfortunately, errors often get printed to the terminal and don't end up in Elixir logs. If this happens to you, try running the kiosk binary by itself:

iex> path = Application.app_dir(:webengine_kiosk, "priv/kiosk")
"/srv/erlang/lib/webengine_kiosk-0.1.0/priv/kiosk"
iex> System.cmd(path, [])