Logging

[legtod2]

Logging on raspberry pi.

Building a few triggercmds on my raspberry pi.
Simple commands like shutdown and reboot work fine.
If I want to launch foreground apps like the calculator "galculator" needs to launch a xterm or gnome app. The default user is pi and triggeragent runs as root.
For debugging purposes of cmds how do I log and view the results.
For example here is my calulator example.
{"trigger":"Gnome Calculator","command":"galculator","ground":"foreground","voice":"calculator","allowParams": "false"},
My assumption is that the command needs references to pi user and xterminal references to launch. But I cant see debug results to fix commands as they become more complex.

[Russ]

@legtod2, to add logging I recommend running a script instead of the galculator command directly. You can add commands in your script that send the output to a log file, like this:

echo Running galculator script >> /tmp/galculator.log

As far as running GUI X windows apps as root that display in the Pi user's X windows environment, please look at this post.

Basically you need these two things:

In your bash script, add this command before it runs galculator:

export DISPLAY=:0.0

And in one of your bash shells running as the pi user, run:

xhost +

If you want the GUI app to run as pi instead of root, you can have your script run them with the su command like this:

su pi -c galculator

[legtod2]

@russ that makes sense and easy to implement. Thanks for the advise.

[legtod2]

@legtod2 That works pretty well
#!/bin/bash
su - pi -c 'export DISPLAY=:0.0; galculator'

{"trigger":"Gnome Calculator","command":"/home/pi/galc.sh","ground":"foregroun
d","voice":"calculator","allowParams": "false"},

Now the next logical question is a close command.

Should I have a 2nd script to perform a kill command or is there a slicker options of having a trigger command with option of open and close ?

[legtod2]

@legtod2 Ok so here's my open and close galculator that works
{"trigger":"Open Calculator","command":"/home/pi/open_galc.sh","ground":"foreground","voice":"open calculator","allowParams": "false"},
{"trigger":"Close Calculator","command":"/home/pi/close_galc.sh","ground":"foreground","voice":"close calculator","allowParams": "false"},

cat open_galc.sh
#!/bin/bash
su - pi -c 'export DISPLAY=:0.0; galculator'
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat close_galc.sh
#!/bin/bash
su - pi -c 'export DISPLAY=:0.0; killall -9 galculator'

[legtod2]

@legtod2 Opps minor tweak on commands.json

{"trigger":"Open Calculator","command":"/home/pi/open_galc.sh","ground":"foreground","voice":"calculator","allowParams": "false"},
{"trigger":"Close Calculator","command":"/home/pi/close_galc.sh","ground":"foreground","voice":"exit","allowParams": "false"},

I guess I need to learn about a command with options

[Russ]

@legtod2, if you want to use the TRIGGERcmd Smart Home Alexa skill to turn on and turn off galculator, I'd recommend using the offCommand field like this:

{"trigger":"Open Calculator","command":"/home/pi/open_galc.sh","offCommand": "/home/pi/close_galc.sh","ground":"foreground","voice":"calculator","allowParams": "true"},

Notice I set "allowParams": "true" which is necessary to use offCommand, but because you're using offCommand, your /home/pi/open_galc.sh command won't receive the on parameter.

Alternatively you could use one shell script that expects the on or off parameter like I did here.