Kiosk mode that can start porgamms/shell script .sh

Question

I want to build a kisok mode much like in Windows where you can start Programms with .hta files.

So is it possible to have a Kind of gui (with chromium I guess) that is able to start specific programs? Or runs a Shell script per button press?

Answer 1

You can use python and Tkinter module:

import tkinter as tk
import os, subprocess   

def btn_click():
    # ASYNCH
    os.system("bash /home/pi/shell_script.sh")

    # SYNCH
    p = subprocess.Popen(["bash", "/home/pi/shell_script.sh"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    out, err = p.communicate()
    print(out, err)

root = tk.Tk()
frame = tk.Frame(root)
frame.pack()

button = tk.Button(frame,text="QUIT", fg="red", command=quit)
button.pack(side=tk.LEFT)
btn_exec1= tk.Button(frame,text="start script 1",command=btn_click)
btn_exec1.pack(side=tk.LEFT)

root.mainloop()

and find correct parameter for design the window same as KIOSK mode (it's just window fullscreen parameters)... If you want a GUI as web-browser you can read the code here.

Answer 2

Kiosk Mode

For the kiosk part of your question, chromium comes with a built in kiosk and app mode, used as follows:

$ chromium-browser --kiosk --app=URL

Example, if you deployed a python GUI on localhost:

$ chromium-browser --kiosk --app=http://127.0.0.1

Web App GUI

As far as a backend GUI (for your clients to interface with, to start your programs/scripts), I would recommend using a Python-based Web App (Something like Dash by Plotly, a very intuitive and easy to learn backend/frontend web app library). It lets you set up a whole page (or even multiple) full of buttons, switches, and even live graphs. Clicking on the buttons/switches/etc can be tied to "callbacks", which are just functions that you define to do certain tasks (in this case, that could be running a bash script).

Calling scripts from the GUI

And as Ephemeral pointed out in his answer, use the python standard library subprocess to actually call a script from the Python app (with Dash you can have a basic callback function that calls it). Refer to this stackoverflow thread on how to accomplish this - it's pretty straightforward.