Re: Services and log management/monitoring

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello!

The kind of “service” that Guix manages is those described here:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Service-Composition.html

The first paragraph tries to explain it:

  Here we define a “service” as, broadly, something that extends the
  functionality of the operating system.  Often a service is a process—a
  “daemon”—started when the system boots: a secure shell server, a Web
  server, the Guix build daemon, etc.  Sometimes a service is a daemon
  whose execution can be triggered by another daemon—e.g., an FTP server
  started by ‘inetd’ or a D-Bus service activated by ‘dbus-daemon’.
  Occasionally, a service does not map to a daemon.  For instance, the
  “account” service collects user accounts and makes sure they exist when
  the system runs; the “udev” service collects device management rules and
  makes them available to the eudev daemon; the ‘/etc’ service populates
  the ‘/etc’ directory of the system.

For services that “map to a daemon”, you’d extend
‘shepherd-root-service-type’ by providing a Shepherd service.  A
Shepherd service is a service managed by PID 1.  You can list them on a
running system by running ‘herd status’ as root.

IOW, Shepherd services are a special case of service.  Just like D-Bus
services are another special case, etc.

About logging: Shepherd does very little in that area.  It limits itself
to providing a #:log-file parameter to capture the processes’s
stdout/stderr to a file.  Other than that we usually configure daemons
to write to syslog, which provides more flexibility regarding storage
and filtering of log entries.

A “non-Shepherd service” as you call them doesn’t necessarily map to a
process, so there’s potentially nothing to log in the first place.

Does that answer your questions?

Thanks,
Ludo’.