Introduction

This is a starter systemd unit and associated install instructions, to save new users the time of building up everything from scratch.

This was created and works as intended on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)

Motivations

• Save researching time for new users
• Adding common starting point for deployment files for distributions, if, as and when kafdrop gets included into packaging systems by linux distributions further downstream.

Note: I could also contribute packaging information for rpm and deb formats, if that's something that'll be useful.

Installation steps

Note: The assumed path of installation ($INSTALLDIR) is /opt/kafdrop. If any other path is used, then the service file needs to be modified to use that path in the # Paths commented section.

1. Create the directory $INSTALLDIR and download the latest release there.

2. Create the kafdrop user and group:

systemd-sysusers --inline 'u  kafdrop  -  "KafDrop user"  $INSTALLDIR  /usr/sbin/nologin'

3. Copy start.sh to $INSTALLDIR, edit it to fix the startup parameters and options for your use case, and give it execute permissions

chmod 755 $INSTALLDIR/start.sh

4. Copy the kafdrop.service file to $INSTALLDIR and create a link to it in /etc/systemd/system

(cd /etc/systemd/system && ln -s $INSTALLDIR/kafdrop.service)

5. Refresh systemd runtime configuration.

systemctl daemon-reload

6. Enable and start service.

systemctl enable kafdrop.service  && systemctl start kafdrop.service

7. Profit!!