FlexFarmer As a Service

Run FlexFarmer as a service - written for Ubuntu Server

Your mileage (Distro) may vary

Ubuntu Server for ARM folks should be able to use this guide as well, pay attention to the note about log files

Visit FlexPool.io to join the pool and download FlexFarmer! (Note that I am in no way affiliated with FlexPool other than pointing my NFT's at their address in hopes of getting some mojos in return)

Come join the Discord

If you have multiple NFTs to point to FlexPool, see the end of this README for a tip on setting this up

Before you get started, please cd into your flexfarmer directory and stay there for the duration

Create the user and group that will run the service

sudo useradd -rms /bin/nologin flexfarmer

Create the service

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/flexfarmer.service

Paste this into service file

[Unit]
Description=https://github.com/F1DNA/FlexFarmerAsAService
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=flexfarmer
Group=flexfarmer
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/flexfarmer -c /home/flexfarmer/.config/flexfarmer/config.yml
LimitNOFILE=99999
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=flexfarmer
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

If you are not familiar with VI/VIM, to save and exit type :wq and then press enter/return

Move (or copy) the flexfarmer python file into /usr/local/bin

sudo cp flexfarmer /usr/local/bin/flexfarmer

Create the directories for the config.yml

sudo -u flexfarmer mkdir -m 0700 -p /home/flexfarmer/.config/flexfarmer

Move (or copy) the config file

sudo cp config.yml /home/flexfarmer/.config/flexfarmer/config.yml

Create the syslog config file

sudo vim /etc/rsyslog.d/flexfarmer.conf

Paste this into config file

if $programname == 'flexfarmer' then /var/log/flexfarmer.log
& stop

If you are not familiar with VI/VIM, to save and exit type :wq and then press enter/return

Note that if you are doing this on anything using an SD card/flashdrive (Looking at you ARM / RPi folks) for the OS disk, consider sending log files to /dev/shm. This will use RAM for the logs so you do not put unneccessary wear on your flash storage. The caveat of course is, logs will not persist after reboot. And you will need to account for this change throughout this guide as I will not be mentioning this again.

Syslog needs to be able to write to this

sudo touch /var/log/flexfarmer.log
sudo chown syslog:adm /var/log/flexfarmer.log

Create log rotation config file (Unless you like filling drives)

sudo vim /etc/logrotate.d/flexfarmer

Paste in the following

/var/log/flexfarmer.log {
    daily
    rotate 7
    copytruncate
    notifempty
    missingok
    su root syslog
}

If you are not familiar with VI/VIM, to save and exit type :wq and then press enter/return

Optional: you can change daily out for weekly or monthly and change the value of rotate to however many of those days, weeks or months you want to keep

Restart rsyslog

sudo systemctl restart rsyslog

Restart sysdemctl daemon to load your new service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Time to make sure flex farmer is not running

ps aux | grep flexfarmer

Use the PID from the output above

Note that it will show up at least twice because "flexfarmer" is in your grep command, you want the other one and the PID (Process ID) is what is circled here

sudo kill <PID> without the <>

Start your new service

sudo service flexfarmer start

Verify it is running and there are no errors

service flexfarmer status

Should show as active and the logs below should not be showing any errors. If it is active but has errors, the service is setup properly and your config.yml probably has something wrong with it. Don't be alarmed by the "Invalids" - look a little closer, no invalid plots, this is a good thing!

Enable auto start of service

sudo systemctl enable flexfarmer.service
sudo systemctl start flexfarmer

Optional: Test autostart:

sudo shutdown -r now

After reboot, do service flexfarmer status and see that everything is A'OK

So where is the output now?

If you notice in the service file you created, you pointed it to syslog. Then later, you told rsyslog to extract that information and send it to /var/log/flexfarmer.log

You can:

cat /var/log/flexfarmer.log

But that just grabs anything up until the moment you cat it

tail -f /var/log/flexfarmer.log

Ah, that's better, it is "following" the log now but I want to see more before I tail 'd it. Okay, one more for you.

tail -f -n +0 /var/log/flexfarmer.log

This will show you the entire log plus continue to follow it.

Admittedly, syslog mucks things up a bit in regards to how pretty the output is from the FlexFarmer program. There is an option in the config.yml to send that output to a log file of your choice if you prefer the pretty.

But how do I update FlexFarmer now?

Download new bundle to somewhere, preferably your /home/ directory

Then extract it:

tar -xvzf flexfarmer-linux-*

cd into flexfarmer directory

sudo cp flexfarmer /usr/local/bin/flexfarmer

Check the config example/templtates and compare to your existing config file should there be anything new to add to your config file, if there is then:

sudo vim /home/flexfarmer/.config/flexfarmer/config.yml

Then restart the service:

sudo systemctl service restart flexfarmer.service

Troubleshooting tips

Log rotation not rotating?

In the config file, I added su root syslog as /var/log is owned by root:syslog in Ubuntu server. If you are using another distro, you should run:

sudo logrotate -vf /etc/logrotate.d/flexfarmer

If you get an error such as:

error: skipping "/var/log/flexfarmer.log" because parent directory has insecure permissions (It's world writable or writable by group which is not "root")

Set "su" directive in config file to tell logrotate which user/group should be used for rotation. Then check owner of /var/log with:

ls -l /var/log

Take note of the user and group from the output. Example:

drwxrwxr-x 11 root syslog 4.0K Aug 5 00:00 log

Here you can see that the user is "root" and group is "syslog". If your distro does it any different, then change line 7 of the config file to match

Thanks to u/rnovak for revieweing, making a few suggestions and testing!

Please visit his blog - Robert Novak on system administration You can also find him in the FlexPool.io Discord under the name @thetasigma06 - please don't tag him, just checkout the Chia Channel and join the convo, he'll see you!

Speakering of Robert, he had a great idea to add to this:

BONUS: Have more than 1 NFT pointed to FlexPool?

When you create the flexfarmer.service file, consider something like this:

NFT#1 - flexNFTXXX.service
NFT#2 - flexNFTZZZ.service

Where you somehow differentiate between your 2x NFT's - maybe last 6 of the Launcher ID or something? I'd advise againts flexNFT1.service and the like cause then you have to reference something else to know which one you need.

Then, and this should be obvious but... you will need 2x config.yml files so prettymuch same thing, nftXXXconfig.yml with all the matching "stuff" inside - be sure when creting the service files, you update the ExecStart= line to point to the correct config file for that NFT.

Should you feel compelled, you may send a tip in the form of XCH to:

xch1u2jhwq9q37v822ejvjytu289th4wad8azuyu7m0gmjuzzzd76dkqx06phs