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
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

systemctl commands

systemctl is the tool you’ll use to manage the services that have been defined on your system. These examples will use the foobar service, which doesn’t really exist, as a stand-in for whatever service you might be managing.

Checking the status of a service

systemctl status <service> checks the status of the service. You’ll get an assortment of data that’s useful for all kinds of troubleshooting tasks. This is what the output for the nginx web server’s service looks like:

Figure 3.1: nginx web server service output

Let’s dissect the information that’s displayed in the dense output that this command produces, line by line:

  • Service name: The name of the service as defined in its unit file.
  • Load state: Whether the service unit file has been successfully loaded and is ready to be started.
  • Active state: The current state of the service – whether it is running, inactive...