Skip to main content

Сonfiguring a node as a Linux service

Prerequisites

You need to download or compile the gear executable file for your OS. See more

Configuration

Copy the gear executable to the /usr/bin directory:

sudo cp gear /usr/bin

To run the Gear node as one of the Linux services, you need to configure the systemd file:

cd /etc/systemd/system
sudo nano gear-node.service

Configure and save:

[Unit]
Description=Gear Node
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/root/
ExecStart=/usr/bin/gear --name "NODE_NAME" --telemetry-url "wss://telemetry.rs/submit 0"
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
LimitNOFILE=10000

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
note

Declaration ExecStart points to the location of the gear binary file. In this case, it is in /usr/bin directory. With -- additional launch parameters are indicated, but not mandatory.

That’s it. You can now start the service.

Starting the node

Run to start the service:

sudo systemctl start gear-node

Automatically get it to start on boot:

sudo systemctl enable gear-node

How to check status of gear-node service?

sudo systemctl status gear-node

Checking logs

You may see the service logs by running the following command:

journalctl -u gear-node

Use navigation keys to browse the logs and q key to exit.

You may see the last 50 lines of logs by adding -n 50 parameter:

journalctl -u gear-node -n 50

Add -f parameter to see the last lines of logs in continuous mode (press Ctrl+C to exit):

journalctl -u gear-node -fn 50

Update the node with the new version

After the node has been running for a while, you may need to update it to the latest version.

You just need to replace the node executable (gear) with the latest version and restart the execution. For example, if your Linux executable is located at /usr/bin/gear (as we've configured above) you are to run:

curl https://get.gear.rs/gear-v1.1.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz | sudo tar -xJC /usr/bin
sudo systemctl restart gear-node

Remove the node

If you no longer need to run the node, you can completely purge it from the disk.

warning

Note that once you delete the node, you will not be able to fully restore it. Refer to the Backup and Restore article to know about the important data to be backed up.

You are to remove the node's storage, the service configuration, and the executable itself:

sudo systemctl stop gear-node
sudo systemctl disable gear-node
sudo rm -rf /root/.local/share/gear
sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/gear-node.service
sudo rm /usr/bin/gear