Windows Service Runner

This repository contains run-service, a simple tool to run any command as a Windows service. The command is started in its own (console) process, and stopped with a Ctrl-C event on its console. The executable to invoke, its parameters, environment, and log files to redirect stdout/stderr into are configured with a JSON file passed to the runner as a command-line parameter.

Similar tools

This runner is similar in purpose to other service managers like NSSM, Apache procrun, or shawl. In most cases, these tools will serve you just fine, and probably better than run-service. In some specific cases, run-service offers more convenience:

• Unlike procrun and NSSM, it's just a service runner, not a service manager. You do not need to invoke run-service to create or delete services. It does not create any additional files or registry entries to store configuration information - everything it needs is in the config file you supply to it. This makes run-service handy for installing services in MSI installers, as you do not need to use custom actions.
• Unlike shawl (which can also be used as a simple runner) run-service uses a JSON configuration file as the source of config information, and not the command line. This mostly eliminates the need to think about shell parsing logic (quotes, paths with spaces, etc.), and makes authoring services with a large amount of command-line arguments more elegant.

How to Build

Install Rust via rustup and run cargo build --release in the root directory of the repository. You should find the binary under target\release\run-service.exe The binary should be stand-alone, and should not require the VC++ redistributables to be installed.

The repository also contains an example service, which you can build with cargo build --example dummy_service and find under target\debug\dummy_service.exe. It can be used as a test service - each second, it prints to stdout, stderr, and to a file called log.txt in its working directory.

How to Use

Create a JSON file containing the configuration for your service:

{
	"executable_path": "path\\to\\test_srv.exe",
	"working_dir": "path\\to\\working\\directory",
	"arguments": ["--arg1", "arg2", "--arg3=val3"],
	"environment": { "ENV_KEY": "ENV_VALUE", "OTHER_ENV_KEY": "OTHER_ENV_VALUE" },
	"stdout_log_file": "path\\to\\stdout.log",
	"stderr_log_file": "path\\to\\stderr.log",
	"shutdown_grace_period_s": 30
}

All settings except executable_path are optional. If the executable_path or working_dir are relative paths, they are taken relative to the directory of the JSON config file - think of the service runner process itself running in the same directory as its config file.

The runner executable's command line is: run-service.exe C:\path\to\config.json. For example, you can create a service with the following command:

sc.exe create MyServiceName binpath="C:\path\to\run-service.exe C:\path\to\config.json"