Creating a systemd service for starting/stopping the Contrast server

Note: As of 3.6.9 the Contrast UI installer configures this functionality by default so there is no need to set it up manually as described below.

Objective

By default, when installing the Contrast server on Linux, an init.d task is created which allows it to automatically startup as the OS starts up. However, some Linux distro's are moving to use systemd as the default means of starting/stopping services.

The following process shows how to create a systemd service for the Contrast server to allow it to be controlled with systemctl.

Process

We'll first need to create the following file at the given location:

/etc/systemd/system/contrast-server.service

The contents of this file will be:

[Unit]
Description=Contrast Server

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/opt/contrast/bin/contrast-server start
ExecStop=/opt/contrast/bin/contrast-server stop
User=contrast_service
TimeoutSec=900

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Please note: /opt/contrast is given here as an example of the Contrast server installation directory, it should be replaced with the actual install directory. Some Linux distributions don't allow for relative paths or variables to be used within systemd services.

Once in place, run the following command to load your new systemd service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Finally, you can start and stop the Contrast server with the following commands:

sudo systemctl start contrast-server
sudo systemctl stop contrast-server

The Contrast server should also start when the OS starts.