Run in the background

Run the Node in the Background

While you've probably used the persistenceCore start command in a terminal, you might question yourself what happens if you exit the window, stop the node by mistake, or need to restart your server. The answer is services. Imagine a service as a container for processes. It allows the Persistence Core-1 node to run in the background while providing us with access to logs. Not to mention it's starting automatically on system (re)boot. In this section we will cover systemd.

Running a service using systemd is straightforward. While systemd itself provides many configuration options, we only need a few to run the Persistence Core-1 node. Let's get started.

1. Since systemd is installed by default, there are no installation steps.

2. First, we need to create a service file in /etc/systemd/system. Let's name it core-1.service.

   touch /etc/systemd/system/core-1.service # create the file
   nano /etc/systemd/system/core-1.service # open the file (to edit it)

3. Now, with the file created and open, we need to populate it with the correct options to run the Persistence Core-1 Node.

   [Unit]
   Description=Persistence Mainnet Node # description of the process running inside the service
   After=network-online.target # wait for internet connection before starting the process
   
   [Service]
   User=$USER # your system user name
   ExecStart=$(which persistenceCore) start # command to execute (this will run the node)
   Restart=always # always maintain the service running by restarting it in case it crashes
   RestartSec=3 # seconds to wait before restarting
   LimitNOFILE=4096 # maximum number of processes allowed to run in parallel
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target # a special target unit for setting up a multi-user system

4. Next, we need to reload systemd and enable the service.

   systemctl daemon-reload
   systemctl enable core-1.service
   # output: Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/core-1.service → /etc/systemd/system/core-1.service

5. All that's left to do is to start it.

   systemctl start core-1.service

6. Although you may think nothing has happened, the service is running in the background. To access its logs and see if it's running as it should use the following command:

   journalctl -u core-1.service -f

7. To check the status of the service, you can run:

   service core-1.service status

Additional commands:

systemctl stop core-1.service
systemctl restart core-1.service