socket-activate

README

socket-activate

This is a little tool to add systemd socket activation to services that do not support it yet. This way services don't have be started at system boot, but are instead started on demand on first interaction (and possibly never if never used).

socket-activate also supports deactivating services again after a certain time of inactivity to save system resources.

Usage

socket-activate can be used on its own, but it's most useful when used in conjunction with a systemd-socket-unit, obtaining systemd socket activation for arbitraty services (although currently only tcp-sockets are implemented, though).

socket-activate itself

Usage of ./socket-activate:
  -a string
        destination address (default "127.0.0.1:80")
  -m string
        mode, available: tcp (default "tcp")
  -t duration
        inactivity timeout after which to stop the unit again
  -u string
        corresponding unit (default "null.service")

Usage example: Grafana

Deploy a unit /etc/systemd/system/socket-activate-grafana.service (ensure you adjust the ExecStart according to the location of socket-activate):

[Unit]
Description=Socket activation proxy for grafana.service
Requires=socket-activate-grafana.socket

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/socket-activate -u grafana.service -a "127.0.0.1:3000" -t 15m
NonBlocking=true

and a corresponding unit /etc/systemd/system/socket-activate-grafana.socket:

[Unit]
Description=Socket for grafana.service

[Socket]
ListenStream=127.0.0.1:1234
NoDelay=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

You can now leave grafana.service disabled and stopped, it will automatically be activated once you access 127.0.0.1:1234 and proxy all requests to the Grafana instance behind. If -t is specified, Grafana will be stopped again after the specified amount of time of no interaction (in this case 15min).

How to get it

Arch

Install from AUR.

Build from source

Either

go get -u github.com/cherti/typemute

and find the binary in GOPATH/bin (defaults to ~/go/bin) or clone and

go get -u github.com/sqp/pulseaudio  # get the dependency
go build typemute.go  # and build locally