How to run terracotta as a service
I’ve blogged about terracotta before and if you want to find out more about it I suggest you start on their website.
One thing that terracotta doesn’t provide out of the box is a way of running as a background service. While it is pretty easy to run the command in the background with a combination of & and nohup on linux e.g.:
~> nohup start-terracotta-command.sh &
However this doesn’t provide all of the functionally that you might want, like automatic restarts or remote management with JMX. It also doesn’t work on windows (if you care about that).
Luckily it is pretty simple to integrate terracotta with the java service wrapper which is an open source library to run any java program as a service. These are the steps I used to get it working:
- Create an environment variable that points to your terracotta install directory, I use $TERRACOTTA_HOME.
- Extract the correct version of the service wrapper for your platform inside $TERRACOTTA_HOME, my version was wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0.
- Edit your $TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/conf/wrapper.conf so it looks something like this:
wrapper.java.mainclass=org.tanukisoftware.wrapper.WrapperSimpleApp wrapper.java.classpath.1=../lib/wrapper.jar wrapper.java.classpath.2=../../lib/tc.jar wrapper.java.library.path.1=../lib wrapper.java.additional.1=-server wrapper.java.additional.2=-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote wrapper.java.additional.3=-Dtc.install-root=../../ wrapper.java.initmemory=256 wrapper.java.maxmemory=256 wrapper.app.parameter.1=com.tc.server.TCServerMain wrapper.app.parameter.2=-f ../../tc-config.xml wrapper.logfile=../logs/terracotta.log
Of course you can customise most of these options fit your requirements (for example memory options or log file) or add additional parameters. Also in the conf file there are other options which you may want to look at such as logging level.
- Edit your $TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/bin/testwrapper so it looks something like this:
APP_NAME="Terracotta 2.6.2" APP_LONG_NAME="Terracotta 2.6.2" WRAPPER_CMD="$TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/bin/wrapper" WRAPPER_CONF="$TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/conf/wrapper.conf" PIDDIR="$TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/"
- You should also rename $TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/bin/testwrapper to a sensible name e.g. $TERRACOTTA_HOME/wrapper-linux-x86-32-3.3.0/bin/terracotta-wrapper.
- You can optionally move this terracotta-wrapper file to a different location, for example /etc/init.d/ on linux.
- Thats it. To run use this:
/etc/init.d/terracotta-wrapper start
To stop use this:
/etc/init.d/terracotta-wrapper stop
You can use ‘restart’ to stop and start the service, ’status’ to see the status of the service and ‘dump’ to take a thread dump of the running java program.
- Anything sent to System.out will be logged to the text file defined earlier (wrapper.logfile)
These instructions are only the basic ones needed to get up and running and I recommend that you read through the service wrapper docs so that you get the system that fits best with your requirements.
Please let me know if this is of some use to you, or if you have any other ideas on how to run terracotta as a service.
Tags: service, terracottaWeb 2.0 crisis
I’ve recently had a web 2.0 crisis, specifically I decided that for a computer geek that works for a web 2.0 search engine I needed to be using more web 2.0 services than just facebook and google reader. So to rectify this I have signed up to twitter and and to retaggr.
I’m sure you have all heard about twitter, if you haven’t then what are you doing reading the blog of a computer geek? You can follow me here. I did have a niftly little twitter gadget on this blog, but twitter is a bit unreliable at the moment (overloaded) and was slowing down my page load too much.
Retaggr is a kind of on line profile aggregator, like an online business card. It provides a neat way of showing all of your online accounts, like facebook, linkedin, or last.fm all in one place. They also provide a wordpress plugin so you can retaggr enable your blog. This basically means that if you leave a comment and are signed up to retaggr then your profile card will popup when someone hovers over your name (sign up and make a comment here if you dont believe me). You can see my retaggr profile by clicking on the retaggr button in the right hand side of my blog.
I am also going to sign up to del.icio.us when I get time, which I know isn’t really that new, but is still something that I feel I should be using, especially since I now have nothing to synchronise my firefox bookmarks easily.
p.s. sorry for the over enthusiastic use of the term web 2.0 in this post, I know it doesn’t really mean anything 
