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

Processes and services

Let’s talk about the subtle difference between processes and services. You can think of a service as some packaging around a piece of software that makes it easier to manage as a running process.

A service adds convenient features to how a program (and the resulting process spawned by that program) is handled by the system. For example, it lets you define dependencies between different processes, control startup order, add environment variables for the process to start with, limit resource usage, control permissions, and many other useful things. To tie a bow around the whole package, a service provides a simple name to reference your program. We’ll show you how to create your own service in the later Chapter 10, Configuring Software.

In the rest of this chapter, we’ll stick to managing existing services.