Running Swatch as a permanent Daemon.

Starting Swatch on Boot

I had difficulty registering swatch as service on debian linux. The solution was simply to run it from /etc/rc.local.

I prefer running swatch from /etc/rc.local because it is easy to include multiple swatch commands to watch multiple logs simultaneously and you don’t have to trouble yourself with mutliple files in /etc/init.d that may not enable properly.

Here is the configuration:

Edit /etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service

[Unit]
 Description=/etc/rc.local Compatibility
 ConditionPathExists=/etc/rc.local

[Service]
 Type=forking
 ExecStart=/etc/rc.local start
 TimeoutSec=0
 StandardOutput=tty
 RemainAfterExit=yes
 SysVStartPriority=99

[Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

Run these commands to create the file /etc/rc.local and make it executable:

printf '%s\n' '#!/bin/bash' 'exit 0' | tee -a /etc/rc.local
chmod 755 /etc/rc.local

Enable rc-local as a service:

systemctl enable rc-local

Now, just edit /etc/rc.local and keep it simple.

#!/bin/bash

PATH="/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin"
/bin/mkdir -p /tmp/swatch
/usr/bin/swatch --daemon \
                --config-file=/etc/swatch.conf \
                --tail-file=/var/log/test.log \
                --pid-file=/var/run/swatch.pid \
                --script-dir=/tmp/swatch >> /var/log/swatch.log 2>&1
exit 0

Reboot, and you will find that swatch is running perfectly:

ps -ef | grep swatch|grep -v "grep"
root       370     1  0 14:29 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/swatch --daemon --config-file=/etc/swatch.conf --tail-file=/var/log/test.log --pid-file=/var/run/swatch.pid --script-dir=/tmp/swatch

Run a test to see that it is sending an instant message:

echo "trouble" >> /var/log/test.log

It works!

Reconfiguring and Restarting Swatch

Another reason I like using /etc/rc.local to launch swatch is how easy it is to reconfigure it and restart it. Here is an example

# edit swatch.conf to make some change to the configuration
vi /etc/swatch.conf 

# kill the swatch processes
pkill swatch

# run /etc/rc.local as a script and test the results
/etc/rc.local 

Keeping Swatch Alive

Swatch is not a process that will require a lot of system resources so it is likely to stay alive. If you are worried about it, you could create a cronjob that does the following:

• counts the number of swatch processes running
• if not the number expected:
  • kill remaining swatch processes
  • run /etc/rc.local as a script