systemd and its associated command systemctl are fundamental elements of most modern Linux distributions. They offer a host of advantages when it comes to managing and controlling system services, including various applications. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of setting up a service for the oak-collator program. This setup ensures that the oak-collator automatically restarts after system reboot or unexpected program shutdown, enhancing its reliability and ease of use.
Preparation
To prepare for setting up a systemd service for the OAK binary, you’ll need the
following information:
INSTALLATION_DIR: Directory where downloaded theoak-collatorbinaryNODE_NAME: Custom identifier for your nodeDATA_DIR: Directory where you would like to store OAK blockchain dataNODE_KEY: Key for running your collatorUSER: User that the service should run asGROUP: Group that the service should run as
Installation
Once you have prepared the required information, you can use the following
service definition to run the OAK collator. On Debian based distributions, this
file should be placed at /etc/systemd/system/oak-collator.service.
[Unit]
Description="OAK Collator"
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0
[Service]
ExecStart=INSTALLATION_DIR/oak-collator \
--name=NODE_NAME \
--base-path=DATA_DIR \
--chain=turing \
--node-key=NODE_KEY \
--collator \
--force-authoring \
--execution=wasm \
-- \
--execution=wasm \
--no-telemetry
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
KillSignal=SIGHUP
User=USER
Group=GROUP
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
After you have created the service definition, you can enable and start the
service using systemctl:
systemctl enable oak-collator
systemctl start oak-collator
Usage
systemd will automatically start your collator when you restart your system or if the process is killed. Here are some other commands that might be useful while operating an OAK node.
-
systemctl status oak-collator --no-pager --fullGet the running status of the program. The
--no-pageroption will avoid text cutoff from long lines. -
journalctl -u oak-collator -fView logs of the program. The
-fwill follow and stream the latest lines. For more display options please refer to the instructions inman journalctl. -
systemctl restart oak-collatorRestart the collator service
Monitoring & Alerting
Since OAK is a Substrate-based project, you can use Node Exporter, Prometheus and Grafana to monitor your nodes. For more information, please follow this Substrate tutorial.