post on winsw (reflectoring#119)

.

_posts/2018-01-14-autostart-with-winsw.md

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: Autostart for your Spring Boot Application
+categories: [frameworks]
+modified: 2018-01-14
+author: david
+tags: [winsw, spring, windows, autostart]
+comments: true
+ads: false
+---
+A few month ago I was getting asked to find a solution for starting and stopping a spring boot application **automatically** together with the computer this application was running on. After doing some research I found a nice fitting and open source solution with [**WinSW**](https://github.com/kohsuke/winsw).
+
+As you can read on the Github page of WinSW it "is an executable binary, which can be used to wrap and manage a custom process as a Windows service". This windows service can be used to automatically start/stop your application on computer startup/shutdown. After downloading the binary (you can find it [here](http://repo.jenkins-ci.org/releases/com/sun/winsw/winsw/)) you have to perform the following simple steps to install your own custom windows service.
+
+First you take the downloaded **winsw-2.1.2-bin.exe** file and rename it to the name of your service. In this example I will call this **IoTConnector.exe**. In the next step you have to create a new **IoTConnector.xml** file and place it right next to the executable (it is mandatory that the file name is the same). This xml file holds all the configuration for your custom windows service. It could look like the following example:
+
+```xml
+<service>
+    <!-- ID of the service. It should be unique accross the Windows system -->
+    <id>IoTConnector</id>
+    <!-- Display name of the service -->
+    <name>IoTConnector</name>
+    <!-- Service description -->
+    <description>This service runs the IoTConnector.</description>
+    <!-- Path to the executable, which should be started -->
+    <executable>java</executable>
+    <arguments>-jar "%BASE%\iotConnector.jar"</arguments>
+    <logpath>%BASE%\log</logpath>
+    <log mode="roll-by-time">
+    <pattern>yyyyMMdd</pattern>
+    <download from="http://www.example.de/spring-application/iotconnector/iotConnector.jar" 
+        to="%BASE%\iotConnector.jar"
+        auth="basic" unsecureAuth="true"
+        user="aUser" password="aPassw0rd"/>
+    </log>
+</service>
+```
+
+This configurations basically tells the windows service to:
+
+1. Download the jar file from the given URL and place it in the current folder
+2. Execute the just downloaded jar by executing the command `java -jar iotConnector.jar`
+3. Save all logs into the `log` folder (for more details about logging [click here](https://github.com/kohsuke/winsw/blob/master/doc/loggingAndErrorReporting.md))
+
+To finally install the service as a windows service you open your command line in the current folder and execute `IoTConnector.exe install`. After the installation you can directly test your service by executing `IoTConnector.exe test`. Now you can manage this service like any other default windows service. To put it in the autostart you have to navigate to your windows services, select the just created service and set the **Startup type** to **Automatic**.
+
+As seen in this short example **WinSW** can be used not only for executing java programs automatically on windows startup but also for updating your programms automatically. In case you need to update this jar file on multiple windows clients this can be a pretty neat feature, because you only have to replace the jar hosted on `http://www.example.de/spring-application/iotconnector/iotConnector.jar` and restart the computers.