AnthiasViewer

The Qt-based browser that the viewer service launches on each display. The host viewer binds it via D-Bus (anthias.viewer at /Anthias) to load pages, images, and arm a per-asset auto-refresh timer.

Renamed from AnthiasWebview / anthias.webview in GH #2906 Phase 4. The source directory is still src/anthias_webview/; it'll move to src/anthias_viewer/ once the Python viewer package is deleted (Phase 5).

Build flow

The viewer binary is compiled inside the viewer image as a multi-stage build — there is no separate release tag, no curl-from-releases step, no version pin to bump. Editing source under src/anthias_webview/src/ triggers a rebuild on the next viewer image build:

• Qt 6 boards (pi4-64, pi5, x86) — Debian's qt6-base-dev + qt6-webengine-dev packages, qmake6 && make && make install, inline in docker/Dockerfile.viewer.j2.
• Qt 5 boards (pi2, pi3) — cross-compiled against a pre-built Qt 5 toolchain, all in docker/Dockerfile.qt5-webview-builder.j2. Qt 5 is frozen for these boards, so the toolchain itself is a permanent artifact at the WebView-v2026.07.1 GitHub release.

To rebuild a viewer image (which rebuilds the binary):

uv run python -m tools.image_builder \
    --service viewer --build-target <board>

Qt 5 toolchain rebuilds (rare)

If the Qt 5 toolchain itself needs to change (CVE patch, base image bump), bin/rebuild_qt5_toolchain.sh produces fresh qt5-5.15.19-trixie-{pi2,pi3}.tar.gz tarballs. Re-uploading them to the same WebView-v2026.07.1 release tag means no source change is needed elsewhere; uploading to a new tag means bumping qt5_toolchain_url in tools/image_builder/utils.py. Runtime is ~2-4 hours per board on a beefy x86 host (Qt 5 + QtWebEngine under qemu-arm); see the script header for memory caveats.

D-Bus API

The binary registers anthias.viewer at /Anthias on the session bus and exposes three methods:

• loadPage(url) — load an HTTP(S) URL.
• loadImage(path) — render a local image asset.
• setReloadInterval(seconds) — arm an auto-refresh timer that reloads the visible page every seconds seconds (0 disables). The timer clears automatically on the next loadPage/loadImage, so the caller arms it once after each load and the webview forgets it on the next rotation.

Example:

from pydbus import SessionBus

bus = SessionBus()
browser_bus = bus.get('anthias.viewer', '/Anthias')

browser_bus.loadPage("https://www.example.com")
browser_bus.setReloadInterval(30)  # reload every 30s; 0 disables

Debugging

Enable Qt debug logging at runtime:

export QT_LOGGING_RULES=qt.qpa.*=true