Installing EFM as an Operating System Service

The EFM executable supports installation as a service on most Linux distributions. This is an optional installation step that is not required if you prefer to start the EFM server from the efm.sh executable included in the EFM bin directory.

You can start the application as a service by using either init.d or systemd.

Install EFM as an init.d Service

To install EFM as an init.d service, symlink bin/efm.sh to init.d.

$ sudo ln -s /path/to/efm/bin/efm.sh /etc/init.d/efm

Once installed, you can start and stop the service as you would other OS services. For example:

$ service efm start

To configure EFM to start automatically on system boot, use update-rc.d. See man update-rc.d for information on using this utility.

note

The EFM application runs as the user who owns the efm.sh launch script. It is recommended to never run as root. The recommended best practice is to create a specific user for running efm. Then use chown to make that user the owner of efm.sh. For example:

$ chown efm:efm /path/to/efm/bin/efm.sh

It is also recommended to use Unix or Linux filesystem permissions in order to secure the EFM installation. The rule of setting minimal access permissions applies. All files in the EFM installation should only be accessible to the EFM run-as user. Configuration files should be made read-only (for example, chmod 400 <file>). Executable files, such as those in the bin directory, should be made read and executable only (for example, chmod 500 <file>). Directories in the EFM install location should be readable and writable to the EFM user (for example, chmod 600 <dir>).

Install EFM as a systemd Service

Most modern Linux distributions now use systemd as the successor to init.d (System V). In many cases you can continue to use init.d, but it is also possible to launch EFM using systemd as a service configuration.

To install EFM as a systemd service, create a file named efm.service in the /etc/systemd/system directory. For example:

[Unit]
Description=efm
After=syslog.target

[Service]
User=efm
ExecStart=/path/to/efm/bin/efm.sh
SuccessExitStatus=143

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target