Running bliss without a home folder
November 28, 2018 in bliss by Dan Gravell
A quick tip for Linux users looking to set up bliss on a headless server.
Sometimes it's useful to run bliss as a particular user. In my case I recently set up a bliss install on a new Linux based (Xubuntu Server 18.04) home server. All music is owned by the music user, in the music group. So I wanted bliss to run as this user.
The trouble is, bliss by default assumes a home folder is available. As my music user has no such folder, bliss wouldn't start.
The fix is to tweak a couple of variables when starting bliss. bliss accepts a VMARGS environment variable that can be used to adjust some of its settings. In this case, we need to specify a new working directory and a place to store some other important files.
So I setup my VMARGS as so:
export VMARGS="-Dbliss_working_directory=/var/local/bliss -Djava.util.prefs.userRoot=/var/local/bliss/prefs"
(After creating the requisite folders of course). The bliss script can then be run.
You might want to combine this with running as a daemon (specific instructions for Ubuntu here).
Thanks to NASA for the image above.
