System services#

Cinemate uses three long-running services and one maintenance timer for its operation.

cinemate-autostart.service#

Responsible for autostart of Cinemate on boot. By default, it is turned off on the downloadable image file.

Starting in v3.2 the service now waits for the camera sensor to come online before launching the UI. The helper script /usr/local/bin/camera-ready.sh polls cinepi-raw --list-cameras for up to 30 seconds and logs progress to the systemd journal so Cinemate does not start with a black screen if the IMX sensor is still initialising.

When Plymouth is enabled on the Pi image, the service is attached to tty1 and ordered around the Plymouth quit units so the boot spinner stays visible until Cinemate is ready to take over, without flashing the autologin CLI in between.

Plymouth is optional. Cinemate still starts correctly if Plymouth is not installed; you simply will not get the boot spinner or the smoother spinner-to-Cinemate handoff used on the image.

While cinemate-autostart.service is running, tty1 is reserved for Plymouth and the Cinemate GUI. The local login prompt is therefore suppressed on tty1 during runtime. On a normal Cinemate stop, the service restores the tty1 CLI; during a full Pi reboot or shutdown, the service leaves tty1 available for Plymouth so the shutdown spinner can stay visible instead. Use SSH or switch to tty2 if you need a shell while Cinemate is active.

The service now uses Type=notify, so systemd can track Cinemate's boot progress through status messages such as the splash becoming active and the GUI starting. To keep journalctl -fu cinemate-autostart readable when ALSA reports noisy underruns, the unit rate-limits log output (see LogRateLimitIntervalSec and LogRateLimitBurst in the service file). Adjust those values if you need more or less verbosity.

Starting, stopping, enabling and disabling the service#

Go to the Cinemate folder:

cd cinemate

make install   # copy service file
make enable    # start on boot
make start     # launch now
make stop      # stop it
make status    # check status
make disable   # disable autostart
make clean     # remove the service

The make install step also copies camera-ready.sh, cinemate-startup-failure-display.sh, and cinemate-console-handoff.sh into /usr/local/bin/ with execute permissions so that the systemd unit can call them during startup, failure replay, and shutdown handoff.

If Cinemate exits before it reaches its real ready state, the service now preserves the colored startup-failure block and the tty1 login shell replays it before showing the prompt. That makes invalid settings.json errors and other early-start crashes visible on the HDMI console without losing the normal shell afterward.

If you want the same clean boot and shutdown handoff as the prebuilt image, install Plymouth separately as described in the manual install guide and then reinstall cinemate-autostart.service so the latest tty1 handoff logic is in place.

To start Cinemate manually, anywhere in the cli, type cinemate.

storage-automount.service#

Storage-automount is a systemd service that watches for removable drives and mounts them automatically. The accompanying Python script reacts to udev events and the CFE-HAT eject button so drives can be attached or detached safely.

It understands ext4, ntfs and exfat filesystems. Partitions labelled RAW are mounted at /media/RAW; any other label is mounted under /media/<LABEL> after sanitising the name. This applies to USB SSDs, NVMe drives and the CFE-HAT slot.

To manually install and enable the service:

cd cinemate/services/storage-automount

sudo make install
sudo make enable

The install step also disables the older cfe-hat-automount.service if it is present. Both services try to manage the same NVMe/CFE storage, and leaving them enabled together can cause /media/RAW to be mounted by storage-automount and then immediately unmounted again by the legacy service.

You can stop or disable it later with:

sudo make stop
sudo make disable

wifi-hotspot.service#

Wifi-hotspot keeps a small access point running with the help of NetworkManager so you can always reach the web interface. The SSID and password are read from /home/pi/cinemate/src/settings.json under system.wifi_hotspot.

This service is a watchdog, not the only hotspot entry point. The main Cinemate app can also create the hotspot during startup when hotspot mode is enabled in settings.json. The service simply keeps that network alive even if the main app is not running.

Install and enable it with:

cd cinemate/services/wifi-hotspot

sudo make install
sudo make enable

As with storage-automount, you can stop or disable the hotspot with

```` make stop make disable

!!! note

      While evaluating, it might be practical to have the Pi connect to your local wifi for easy access (`sudo raspi-config`). Therefore, on the image file, the wifi-hotspot.service is **not** activated by default. Cinemate will still serve its web interface on the available network, but only after `wlan0` or `eth0` has an IP address. You can read more [here](hotspot-logic.md)

## redis-log-maintenance.timer

Redis log maintenance is a lightweight timer-backed helper that keeps `/var/log/redis/redis-server.log` from silently filling the Pi root filesystem over time.

The companion `redis-log-maintenance.service` runs once per timer trigger. It trims the active Redis log in place when it grows too large and removes older Redis log rotations beyond the most recent few files.

Install and enable it with:

```bash
cd cinemate/services/redis-log-maintenance

sudo make install
sudo make enable

The default timer waits a short time after boot and then runs hourly. This is intentionally conservative so it does not interfere with normal Redis logging while still keeping the SD card healthy.

You can inspect it with:

systemctl status redis-log-maintenance.timer
journalctl -u redis-log-maintenance.service