Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

The basics

Linux services are background processes that run on a Linux system to perform specific tasks. They are similar to Windows services or daemons on macOS.

Most non-containerized Linux environments use systemd to manage services. The two tools you’ll use to interact with systemd are:

  • systemctl: Controls services (called ‘units’ in systemd nomenclature)
  • journalctl: Lets you work with system logs

We’ll cover systemctl in this chapter, and journalctl in Chapter 16, Monitoring Application Logs, later in the book.

systemd is a system and service manager for Linux that provides a standard way to manage services. It is now widely used as the default init system for most Linux distributions. Many Linux distributions previously made use of the SysV init systems, which come from Unix and are still used by many modern Unix operating systems. Others, such as Alpine and Gentoo Linux, use OpenRC as their init systems. There are...