OSMC run add-on as root

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi,

I am really new with linux. I would like to create a small add-on in OSMC which can toggle an GPIO in Raspberry Pi2. I can run this in terminal with sudo.
When I modified the code to be able to run as add-on in OSMC, I can not run it, because I get this error:

12:53:57 1139.827148 T:1657795616 ERROR: EXCEPTION Thrown (PythonToCppException) : -->Python callback/script returned the following error<–
- NOTE: IGNORING THIS CAN LEAD TO MEMORY LEAKS!
Error Type: <type ‘exceptions.RuntimeError’>
Error Contents: No access to /dev/mem. Try running as root!
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/osmc/Python/dialog.py”, line 60, in
GPIO.setup(i, GPIO.OUT) # LED pin set as output
RuntimeError: No access to /dev/mem. Try running as root!
–>End of Python script error report<–

How can I run my script as root?

Thanks in advance

2

No escalating privileges within Kodi unfortunately.

But you can call another python script outside of Kodi using command line instructions and subprocess.call().

3

Thanks, it is working.
Based on this, I am going to learn a service programming and comminicating an OSMC script with this service.

4

In new versions of OSMC we do not enforce strict devmem, so you will not need root privileges to interface with GPIO. This has been in for a couple of months or so.

5

Hi Sam, is this still the case? Sorry I realise your comment is from sometime ago but I’m new to OSMC and need to access the GPIO pins with www-data user and as OSMC does not have the GPIO group I can’t add it. I can call my python scripts with sudo but not with the OSMC user or, more importantly for my usage, with the www-data user from my home webpage. Can you help? Thanks :slight_smile:

6

It’s a very old post and I’m not sure exactly what you want to do. @sam_nazarko hasn’t yet responded, so I’m unsure what the current state of play is.

I doubt you need access to /dev/mem but if you want read access to /dev/gpiomen, create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/01-gpio-permissions.rules and paste this line into it:

KERNEL=="gpiomem", SUBSYSTEM=="bcm2835-gpiomem", MODE="0640", GROUP="osmc"

then reboot. Afterwards, /dev/gpiomem will have the following permissions and ownership:

crw-r----- 1 root osmc 244, 0 May 17 12:45 /dev/gpiomem

If you add group osmc to user www-data, your web page should now have read access.

7

I think the www-data user should be able to access it fine