Gekko Background Service With Systemd

How to run Gekko as a background service on startup using systemd

There are plenty of resources on how to run a node.js service with systemd, many could likely piece this together without help. This is a clear and to the point tutorial on how I successfully accomplished this task on a Debian 9 VPS server.

For this example, I will be using the user/group admin/admin and Gekko install in ~/gekko. Replace user/group and path as necessary. If you remove the User= and Group= lines it will run as root, don't do that.

Step 1:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/gekko.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /home/admin/gekko/gekko.js --ui
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=gekko
User=admin
Group=admin
Environment=NODE_ENV=production

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Step 2:

Enable gekko on startup:

• sudo systemctl enable gekko

That's it, really. Restart (sudo restart now) or manually start gekko using the command below.

Other systemctl commands:

Manually start the gekko service:

• sudo systemctl start gekko

Manually stop the gekko service

• sudo systemctl stop gekko

Turn off gekko auto startup

• sudo systemctl disable gekko

Current status of the gekko service

• sudo systemctl status gekko.service

See gekko's logs

• sudo journalctl -u gekko

Clear all but past 2 days of logs

• sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=2d

Note: You can not delete logs for a specific unit/service because all systemd unit logs are interlaced.

Reload changes made to /etc/systemd/system/gekko.service (if you tweak it after it's initial use)

• sudo systemctl daemon-reload