How to run NextPVR as a process (without the terminal)

[mvallevand]

I had trouble installing dotnet 8 with the installer so using brew was easier for me, it just keep downloading aspnet etc. Other than that is just works here (on 15.2)

Martin

[Allan]

Weird. For me the dotnet installation was the smoothest part of the initial setup.

I had copied the user data from my default location running as a user /users/me/.npvr-data/ over to /var/opt/nextpvr and then changed the owner of the files to root:wheel and permissions to 644. I am going to try deleting these files and see what happens.

[Allan]

Well, I deleted the contents of /var/opt/nextpvr/ and loaded the launchdaemon. The backend ran for a second and aborted, but in that second, it started populating /var/opt/nextpvr/

IntelMini:nextpvr allan$ ls -la
total 184
drwxr-xr-x  10 root  wheel    320 28 Jan 12:34 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel    96 23 Jan 18:31 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  20986 28 Jan 12:34 config.xml
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  20989 28 Jan 12:34 config.xml.old
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel    160 28 Jan 12:40 logs
drwxr-xr-x  4 root  wheel    128 28 Jan 12:34 media
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  43008 28 Jan 12:34 npvr.db3
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel    64 28 Jan 12:34 scripts
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel    64 28 Jan 12:34 thumbs
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel    96 28 Jan 12:34 web

During this time, it also did a bit of logging, which may be informative. This is the whole log:

[...startup]
2025-01-28 12:34:16.781 [INFO][1] See LICENSE.txt for license information
2025-01-28 12:34:16.782 [DEBUG][1] No /var/opt/nextpvr/scripts/PreStartup.sh
2025-01-28 12:34:16.784 [DEBUG][1] Checking if upgrade required
2025-01-28 12:34:16.784 [DEBUG][1] master file is /opt/nextpvr/system/data/Config-master-dont-edit.xml
2025-01-28 12:34:16.785 [DEBUG][1] Doing database updates
2025-01-28 12:34:16.785 [DEBUG][1] Database: /var/opt/nextpvr/npvr.db3
2025-01-28 12:34:16.786 [DEBUG][1] missing db...copying from: /opt/nextpvr/system/data/empty.db3
2025-01-28 12:34:16.829 [INFO][1] Version 7.0.1.241229
2025-01-28 12:34:16.829 [DEBUG][1] Creating thumbs directory
2025-01-28 12:34:16.842 [ERROR][1] Recording directory does not exist: C:\Users\Public\Videos\
2025-01-28 12:34:16.843 [DEBUG][1] Defaulting to: /var/root/recordings
2025-01-28 12:34:16.848 [ERROR][1] LiveTV directory does not exist: C:\Users\Public\Videos\

[mvallevand]

That is all expected. Is your other instance running? If not maybe try brew with dotnet and use the right cask for v8

Martin

[Allan]

I was confused by the homebrew formulae, because they seemed to be indicating that dotnet 8 was only for apple silicon on sequoia.

Also, FYI, I actually did not exactly follow sub's instructions re installing dotnet. There was no installer in the ASP.NET Core Runtime 8.0.12 section, only binaries. I had no idea where the binaries belong, what their permissions should be, etc., so I used the SDK 8.0.405 installer instead. The notes said it included ASP.NET Core Runtime 8.0.12, and it worked fine. Once I identified where the binaries were installed, I deleted the sdk folders.

Anyway, for the time being, I have gone back to using a launchagent (modified to the good with your refinements, btw, with the binaries now in /opt/nextpvr/system/ and using the NEXTPVR_DATADIR_USERDATA variable). I want to figure out why I'm having trouble with the launchdaemon, but I'm out of ideas at the moment. I'll probably take another crack at it next weekend. Any ideas are welcome, because I'd really like to make it work, in which case I will post detailed instructions.