Installing Edge Flow Manager as an operating system service

The Edge Flow Manager 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 Edge Flow Manager server from the efm.sh executable included in the Edge Flow Manager bin directory.

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

Install Edge Flow Manager as an init.d service

To install Edge Flow Manager 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 Edge Flow Manager to start automatically on system boot, use update-rc.d. See man update-rc.d for information on using this utility.

note

The Edge Flow Manager 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 Edge Flow Manager. 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 Edge Flow Manager installation. The rule of setting minimal access permissions applies. All files in the Edge Flow Manager installation should only be accessible to the Edge Flow Manager 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 Edge Flow Manager install location should be readable and writable to the Edge Flow Manager user (for example, chmod 600 <dir>).

Install Edge Flow Manager 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 Edge Flow Manager using systemd as a service configuration.

To install Edge Flow Manager 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