Creating a systemd service

Running CMaNGOS as a systemd service

If you are on Linux and use systemd as your init system (default on most popular distributions) you can write unit configuration files to let systemd handle starting your cmangos server as a background process called a service.

Below you will find two example files to start the cmangos world and login servers.

File locations

We assume you have your cmangos configuration files in the default directories relative to the binaries, /path/to/cmangos/etc/ and /path/to/cmangos/bin/ respectively, where /path/to/cmangos/ is the installation location you chose during compilation.

You should also have removed the .dist ending from the configuration files, so the binaries will automatically find them. If this isn't the case you will have to manually supply their location (see comments in the example files below).

Disabling the world servers interactive console

You have to disable the server console of mangosd. This is important! If you don't disable the console the service won't work. Open your mangosd.conf, search for the line

Console.Enable = 1

and change it to 0.

If you don't want to change the default config file so you still have the console when starting from the terminal, you can copy the config file to another name and supply its path to mangosd with the -c option (see below).

The world server

You have to create a file in the /etc/systemd/system directory or link it to there.

You can choose its name freely as long as it ends in .service, it will become the name the systemctl command uses. E.g. if the file is named mangosd-classic.service you will be able to start the service with systemctl start mangosd-classic.

Create the file, copy the text below and then replace all occurences of /path/to/cmangos/ with your installation location.

If you are not using the mangos user on your system, you will have to change the User=mangos line as well.

[Unit]
Description=CMaNGOS world server
After=network.target
Requires=mysqld.service
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1

# Set your username here if it differs
User=mangos
# Set your install location here
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/cmangos/bin
# And here
ExecStart=/path/to/cmangos/bin/mangosd

# The line above assumes the config files are in the default
# places and have default names.
# Example with the config files manually passed along:
# ExecStart=/path/to/cmangos/bin/mangosd -c /path/to/cmangos/etc/mangosd.conf -a /path/to/cmangos/etc/ahbot.conf -p /path/to/cmangos/etc/playerbot.conf

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The realm server

The file for the realm server looks basically exactly the same, but with a different name and different pathes of course. It also only accepts the -c option, -a and -p are not required for the realmd binary.

[Unit]
Description=CMaNGOS login server
After=network.target
Requires=mysqld.service
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1

User=mangos
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/cmangos/bin
ExecStart=/path/to/cmangos/bin/realmd
# ExecStart=/path/to/cmangos/bin/realmd -c /path/to/cmangos/etc/realmd.conf

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Activating the service files

To make systemd aware of the new files you need to run:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

This is also applies if you change the files later.

Using the services

There are several subcommands of systemctl that you can use to manage your services. Assuming you named your files mangosd-classic.service and realmd-classic.service you would start them like this:

sudo systemctl start mangosd-classic
sudo systemctl start realmd-classic

When you do a systemctl status <service> command (no sudo needed for this one) you should see a line like this somewhere at the top:

Active: active (running) since ...

If it says something else, like "dead", something went wrong. Try to look at the logs:

journalctl -xe
sudo journalctl -u <service>

You can stop them like this:

sudo systemctl stop mangosd-classic
sudo systemctl stop realmd-classic

Since the script sets the Restart=always option, the server will always restart if it crashes. But after a system reboot the service will not start on its own again. If you want them to start automatically on boot, you will have to use the enable and disable subcommands of systemctl instead of start and stop:

sudo systemctl enable mangosd-classic
sudo systemctl enable realmd-classic