Issued Running Room-Assistant as Service

[stephenmetzger]

Hey there,

I followed the documentation and have room-assistant running on three RPi 3B+'s. When starting the service by calling room-assistant from the /room-assistant directory, things seem to work fine. But, when started as a service, my devices come up as "Unavailable" or "Unknown" in homeassistant and room-assistant doesnt seem to be publishing anything to my MQTT broker.

I think this may be because I didn't install is in the /home/pi/room-assistant directory as called for in the documentation, but rather in /data/room-assistant. This is just because that is where I have a bunch of other files for services that I run in docker are stored (could not get room-assistant installed via docker, since I can't get docker-compose working on my pi, even though PIP, so went for the basic install - but, would love to be able to get this running in docker...).

I did change the room-assistant.service file so that my WorkingDirectory is /data/room-assistant. No other changes to the .service file were made. I'm guessing maybe I'm running into a permissions issue or something? Any other changes that are required? Other options for starting on boot, like using init.d or rc.local ?

Thanks in advance?

[mKeRix]

Setting the working directory in the services (don't forget to reload the services and restart if you change something) should be enough to make that work in theory. The working directly should point to a dir that contains a config folder, which in turn contains the YAML config files. If that doesn't work out you can also try supply the full path via the CLI option. So make your ExecStart something like this: /opt/nodejs/bin/room-assistant -c /data/room-assistant/config (this points to the actual config folder!).

[mKeRix]

And you can of course also run room-assistant via Docker without docker-compose, the examples are just in that format because it is easier to read. Most of the options translate to Docker CLI arguments 1:1.

[stephenmetzger]

Thanks @mKeRix, for the response!

I ended up reinstalling as a docker container, and after adding cap_add=NET_ADMIN, everything seems to be working beautifully with Bluetooth Classic. However, I'm still not getting consistent performance with BLE devices. I know in the "traditional" install, you are supposed to run the three sudo setcap commands. For docker, is there any additional requirements to have both BT Classic and BLE running together?

For others looking to run in docker, without docker-compose, my docker command was:
docker run -d --name=room-assistant --net=host --restart=always -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus -v /data/room-assistant/config:/room-assistant/config --cap-add=NET_ADMIN mkerix/room-assistant

Of course, you may need to change your volume path to wherever you created your local.yaml file.