Run anything as daemon on Linux

I often have the need to run a piece of software as a daemon on Linux.

As I always tend to forget the exact syntax, I decided to write it down here.

The first step is to create a file in /etc/systemd/system/ with the extension .service (e.g. my-daemon.service).

 1[Unit]
 2Description=Runs myapp as a daemon
 3
 4[Service]
 5Restart=always
 6WorkingDirectory=/var/www/working-dir
 7ExecStart=/var/www/working-dir/my-app
 8StandardOutput=append:/var/www/working-dir/stdout.log
 9StandardError=append:/var/www/working-dir/stderr.log
10Environment="DATA_DIR=data"
11Environment="PORT=3000"
12
13[Install]
14WantedBy=default.target

Once you have the file, you need to install it using the following commands:

1$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
2$ sudo systemctl enable my-daemon.service
3$ sudo systemctl start my-daemon.service

You can run the following commands to control the daemon.

1$ sudo systemctl start my-daemon.service
2$ sudo systemctl stop my-daemon.service
3$ sudo systemctl restart my-daemon.service
4$ sudo systemctl status my-daemon.service