For ad-hoc or temporary RCE network setups, running a headless RCE from the command line is perfectly fine. For more permanent installations, however, we recommend installing RCE as a Linux systemd Service instead. This has the advantage that RCE automatically shuts down when the server is shut down, and automatically restarts when the server does.
This section describes setting up RCE as an auto-start service on Linux.
Please note that the "rce-daemon" command provided with previous RCE releases
for managing System V services is deprecated, and will
most likely be removed in RCE 11.0.
Execute these steps to configure an RCE instance to run as a systemd service:
If not already present, install RCE using the .deb or .rpm package. (While installing a service from the plain .zip distribution is possible, the extra steps regarding file locations and permissions are not covered by this guide.)
Choose a command-line id for the instance; in the
templates below, this is marked as <ID>. Ideally, it should only
consist of ASCII letters and numbers to prevent command-line
complications.
Choose a human-readable description for the instance; in
the templates below, this is marked as <your_description>.
Unlike the ID, this is much more flexible regarding allowed characters. This
description is shown when listing services using systemd commands.
Choose a user and group to run the RCE instance under. Both
the user and the group must already exist. In the template below, replace
<User> and <Group> with the respective names
(e.g. "user1") or numeric ids (e.g. "1000").
Choose a profile folder; in the template below, this is
marked as <profile_folder_name>. In a standard file system
layout, the instance's full profile path will be
/home/<UID>/.rce/<profile_folder_name>. This folder does
not need to exist, as RCE will create it automatically when that profile is
first used (as long as the chosen user/group has sufficient permissions to do
so).
Copy the template below into a file named rce-<ID>.service in
/etc/systemd/system/. Note that on typical systems, you will
need root/sudo permissions to create or edit this file.
By default, make sure this file's permissions are 0644 and
ownership is root:root.
Replace all <placeholders> (description, UID/GID, and the profile folder) in that file.
Important: execute the command
systemctl daemon-reload (as root or via sudo) after editing the
service file to apply the changes.
In systemd terminology, the created .service file is called (or represents) a
"service unit", which is then controlled through various standard commands. See
the section "Useful management commands" below for a list of commands. For now,
just use systemctl start rce-<ID> to start the instance, and
systemctl status rce-<ID> to see if it started as expected.
If it did, use systemctl enable rce-<ID> to auto-start the
service whenever the host machine is rebooted.
The .service unit file template
Lines ending with a backslash ("\") are only wrapped for layouting purposes; these can also be merged into single long lines.
[Unit] Description=<your_description (without quotes)> After=network-online.target Wants=network-online.target [Service] User=<User> Group=<Group> ExecStart=/usr/bin/rce -p <profile_folder_name> \ --headless --launcher.suppressErrors -nosplash ExecStop=/usr/bin/rce -p <profile_folder_name> \ --shutdown --launcher.suppressErrors -nosplash Type=simple [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Useful management commands
These commands must be either run as "root" or prefixed with "sudo".
systemctl start rce-<ID> - starts the service
systemctl stop rce-<ID> - stops the service
systemctl restart rce-<ID> - unsurprisingly, restarts the service
systemctl status rce-<ID> - display the service's status and its latest output
systemctl enable rce-<ID> - marks the service to auto-start after a reboot
systemctl disable rce-<ID> - disables auto-start after a reboot
systemctl list-units "rce-*" - lists all installed RCE services
After installation, the daemon instance will be started automatically. This will create a default configuration file if it does not exist yet.
To configure the daemon instance edit and save the configuration file
(configuration.json) that is located in the profile folder. Then
use systemctl restart rce-<ID> to apply the new configuration.
For importing SSH credentials and authorization group keys into a daemon, please refer to section "Importing authorization data without GUI access" in the User Guide. As of RCE 10, file-based imports are only processed on startup, so a restart is required for this, too.
The need to restart the daemon is temporary; future versions of RCE will apply configuration changes as soon as configuration files are changed or new import files are placed in the respective folders.