5-2: Configure systemd

For production use, using tmux to run Pocket is not recommended. A better option in production is to setup a Linux service using a service manager such as systemd.

Creating a systemd service in Linux

To setup a systemd service for Pocket, do the following:

1. Open nano and create a new file called pocket.service

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

2. Add the following lines to the file:

   [Unit]
   Description=Pocket service
   After=network.target
   Wants=network-online.target systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
   StartLimitIntervalSec=500
   StartLimitBurst=5
   
   [Service]
   Restart=on-failure
   RestartSec=5s
   User=pocket
   ExecStart=/home/pocket/go/bin/pocket start
   ExecStop=/home/pocket/go/bin/pocket stop
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=default.target

3. Make sure the User is set to the user that will run the Pocket service.

4. Make sure the ExecStart and ExecStop paths are set to the path for the Pocket binary.

5. Save the file with Ctrl+O and then return.

6. Exit nano with Ctrl+X.

7. Reload the service files to include the pocket service.

   sudo systemctl daemon-reload

8. Start the pocket service.

   sudo systemctl start pocket.service

9. Verify the service is running.

   sudo systemctl status pocket.service

10. Stop the pocket service.

    sudo systemctl stop pocket.service

11. Verify the service is stopped.

    sudo systemctl status pocket.service

12. Set the service to start on boot.

    sudo systemctl enable pocket.service

13. Verify the service is set to start on boot.

    sudo systemctl list-unit-files --type=service

14. Start the pocket service.

    sudo systemctl start pocket.service

Other systemctl commands

• To restart the service:

  sudo systemctl restart pocket.service

• To prevent the service from starting on boot:

  sudo systemctl disable pocket.service

• To see mounted volumes:

  sudo systemctl list-units --type=mount

  Note: If your pocket data is on a separate partition, you can use the following command to in the pocket.service file to mount it before the pocket service starts.

  After=network.target mnt-data.mount

  This ensures that the network is up and the volume is mounted before the pocket service starts.

Viewing the logs

To view the logs for the pocket service, do the following:

sudo journalctl -u pocket.service

To view just the last 100 lines of the logs (equiv. tail -f), do the following:

sudo journalctl -u pocket.service -n 100 --no-pager

Finding Errors

There are a few ways to find errors in the logs.

sudo journalctl -u pocket.service | grep -i error