Running Applications as a system service

In this post, we will talk about how to configure your applications to run as a system service in Linux.

STEP 1. Make a backoffice.service file in /etc/systemd/system/ directory.

#/etc/systemd/system/backoffice.service
[Unit] 
 Description= Back office service 
 After=mysqld.service 
 StartLimitIntervalSec=0
[Service] 
 Type=simple 
 Restart=always 
 RestartSec=1 
 User=root 
 ExecStart=/usr/bin/env node /path/to/server/app.js 
 
 [Install] 
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

STEP 2. Run this command to make your daemon aware of your application.

systemctl daemon-reload

STEP 3. Run this command to start your application.

systemctl start backoffice
systemctl enable backoffice

STEP 4. Check your application as a service

service backoffice status
or 
journalctl -u backoffice

You can also use other services such as nohup, forever, pm2, etc. to configure your application or you can use Linux crontab as well to make your application available all the time.