Running a webpage on startup

Question

I have a touchscreen based kiosk application running on my raspberry pi. In this application I need to load a webpage , which once opened will load a user interface. Now, my question is how do the make the raspberry pi load this page directly on every reboot ? What is the best way of doing this ?

Also, when a raspberry pi boots up, there are bunch of boot parameters that load until the raspberry GUI loads up. Is there any way of not showing any of these boot parameters on screen and just show up a blank screen or some screensaver until the webpage I intend to open automatically, shows up ?

Answer 1

to hide all output while booting you can boot "silent". this means all output will be redirected to tty3.

edit /boot/cmdline.txt !! every thing need to be in one line!!

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty3 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet vt.global_cursor_default=0 logo.nologo loglevel=3

then edit /boot/config.txt and append the following lines on the end:

disable_overscan=1
disable_splash=1
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

instead of the black boot screen you can run a theme, show a logo or play a vid. for this install plymouth

apt-get install plymouth plymouth-themes

set a theme and change the initrd.img:

plymouth-set-default-theme -R glow

with this settings your raspberry will boot without showing output and present a custom boot screen.

if you dont want something else on raspberry that a browser and your web page in kiosk mode, raspbian-lite with Matchbox as window manager is sufficient.

sudo -i
apt-get update
apt-get install xorg --no-install-recommends gdm3 matchbox x11-xserver-utils Iceweasel
apt-get install -f

now you need to config the display manager /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf and let the pi unser log in automatically

[daemon]
# Enabling automatic login
AutomaticLoginEnable = true
AutomaticLogin = pi

for the user pi the following session settings will be defined in /home/pi/.xsession

#!/bin/bash
xset -dpms     
xset s off    
xset s noblank
matchbox-window-manager -use_cursor no -use_titlebar no &
while true; do
    rm -rf /home/pi/.cache/
    rm -rf /home/pi/.config/
    iceweasel http://yourwebsite.com
    sleep 1
done

with chmod a+x /home/pi/.xsession the script will be executable.