Ansible & LibreELEC

1st Official Post

    Is there any guidance on using Ansible to manage LibreELEC instances?

    As an example, LibreELEC does not seem to use disabling or masking of service units to keep them from starting. I've noticed that the suffixes of files in /storage/.cache/services change with modifications through the GUI, but it is not clear if that is how services are controlled or a side effect of some other mechanism. It would be easy enough to modify those files with Ansible, but I want to be sure that I am "playing nicely" with LibreELEC.

    • Official Post

    The LE settings add-on was authored in 2013 long before systemd was being used seriously in the distro so it doesn't follow mask/unmask conventions for controlling service start/stop; instead there are boot-time scripts that read presence (or not) of files and even the read the content to determine how some things start. There's an underlying theme but each service may have quirks so you'll need to ask more-specific questions to get a specific answer for a specific service. The settings add-on also controls all the networking bits via connman over d-bus; you cannot modify networking by editing files unless you stop connman, edit, then restart, else connman does not know about the changes and will overwrite things. LE settings and how some of the boot-time things are done are long overdue a rethink and rewrite, but that requires someone to volunteer to do it, and "if it works, don't fix it" often applies :)