svc

Tool that lets you install an arbitrary executables as a service

Why

This was a day I was trying to install fukn' nginx as a windows service and since it doesn't provide a way (as of July 2013) to do it, I thought I would find an easy way to do it. I tried a couple of Windows Service wrappers like kohsuke's winsw and what seems to be it's predecessor to all fail on me.

After spending a whole day on this mundane task, I found kardianos's awesome project which lets you, albeit programatically, install arbitrary programs as windows services. It seems to support other unix-like systems as well.

Prerequisites

You have to have kardianos's awesome service project. It is the only dependency.

  go get https://bitbucket.org/kardianos/service

Usage

Clone the project:

  git clone https://github.com/fcarriedo/svc

Put the svc.go file on the directory where your to-be-service is located.

Open the svc.go file and update the svcDescriptor with the details of your executable. For the sake of the example, lets say we want to embed nginx in our nginx-svc.exe service wrapper:

var svcDescriptor = `
<service>
  <id>nginx</id>
  <name>nginx</name>
  <desc>nginx awesomeness</desc>
  <exec>C:/Apps/nginx/nginx.exe</exec>
  <args>-p C:/Apps/nginx</args>
  <stopexec>C:/Apps/nginx/nginx.exe</stopexec>
  <stopargs>-p C:/Apps/nginx -s stop</stopargs>
</service>
`

Compile it:

  go build svc.go -o nginx-svc.exe

Now your ready to install your service and/or manipulate it.

To install it:

  nginx-svc.exe install

You can also start and stop the service from your executable as:

  nginx-svc.exe [start|stop]

Or remove it from services as:

  nginx-svc.exe remove

Note: This should work for linux/unix like systems but hasn't been tested.

Note 2: I couln't put the service descriptor as a file as of now. It was causing a failure when starting it from the serivces (I believe it is permission related). For now, you'll just have to compile it. I know it sucks but I'll leave it like that until I can investigate further.