unix_service.md

Creating a Service for Neolink

This will guide you through creating a service for neolink that can be used on linux machines such as ubuntu and debian buster/stetch or any other os that uses systemd.

The general steps are:

1. Create an unprivileged user to run neolink
2. Set up neolink somewhere the unprivileged user can run it
3. Creating the service file

Creating the unprivileged user

For this I will use the username neolinker. Any unused name would be fine.

sudo adduser --system --no-create-home --shell /bin/false neolinker

Depending on your flavour of linux adduser may have also created a group of the same name. If it did not, you can create a group with:

sudo addgroup --system neolinker

Setting up neolink

For this we will put neolink in /usr/local/bin and the config in /usr/local/etc but any directory readable by the neolinker user would be fine.

We will also secure the config file so that only neolinker (and root) can read it. We want to do this because it contains passwords.

sudo cp neolink /usr/local/bin/neolink
sudo cp my_config.toml /usr/local/etc/neolink_config.toml
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/neolink
sudo chown neolinker:neolinker /usr/local/etc/neolink_config.toml
sudo chmod 600 /usr/local/etc/neolink_config.toml

Creating the service

We will create a systemd service. This service will need to point to our files for using neolink and also instruct it to start with our unprivileged user.

Create a file here /etc/systemd/system/neolink.service with the following contents (you will need admin privileges to write to this location):

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Unit]
Description=Neolink service

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/neolink rtsp --config /usr/local/etc/neolink_config.toml
Restart=on-failure
User=neolinker
Group=neolinker

And that's it

Controlling the Service

You can now control the service with the usual commands

To start it use:

systemctl start neolink

To stop it use:

systemctl stop neolink

To check it's running use:

systemctl status neolink

To make it run at startup from now on:

systemctl enable neolink

You can check it's log file with

journalctl -xeu neolink