kodi-standalone-service

A simple systemd service file to run kodi in standalone mode.

Installation

Arch Linux

Arch Linux users (not Arch ARM users) can find a PKGBUILD in the AUR that will take care of everything. Simply install and use.

Other distros

Users of other distros should copy kodi.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/ and should create both a kodi user and home directory as follows:

 useradd -c 'kodi user' -u 420 -g kodi -G audio,video,network,optical \
   -d /var/lib/kodi -s /usr/bin/nologin kodi
 
 passwd -l kodi > /dev/null

 mkdir /var/lib/kodi/.kodi
 chown -R kodi:kodi /var/lib/kodi/.kodi

Usage

Simply call systemd to start the service:

systemctl start kodi

Dependency List

• polkit
• systemd
• xorg-server with xorg-xinit

Notes

Most users should not need /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config since the created X server becomes the controlling process of the VT to which it is bound. Most users does not mean all users. There have been reports of some AMD users still requiring this file. As well, users of Xorg's native modesetting driver may also require it.

The recommendation is to first try starting kodi.service without it, but if the service fails to start X, you may need to create /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config which should contain the following:

needs_root_rights = yes

Users wishing to run the kodi web service on a privileged port (i.e. <1024) can simply modify kodi.service to contain the following line under the [Service] section: AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE

If installing this manually, that should be all that's needed. If installing from the AUR, to avoid an overwrite, simply copy kodi.service (with the modified line) to /etc/systemd/system which will take president over the package-provided one.

Credit

Note that this service was provided by the Arch Linux maintainers of the official kodi package, but was removed upon the 1.16-1 release of Xorg.