Installing Ethereum and the blockchain with its “geth” tool on the current version on Ubuntu is rather straightforward. The same counts of course also for transferring Ethers to a local wallet. In order to keep the blockchain in sync locally at all times, it is necessary to launch the command line interface manually each time the system reboots – which may not be an interesting property when you analyzing the blockchain data. Since I constantly transfer the blockchain to my MongoDB I therefore needed some sort of autostart. SystemD offers the an elegant solution to this problem.
Creating a Systemd Service
A systemd service is a handy way to run the command line interface at startup. Here is the content of the file /lib/systemd/system/geth.service that does exactly that:
[Unit] Description=The Ethereum Blockchain Command Line Interface Documentation=man:geth(1) After=network.target [Service] User=[YOUR USERNAME GOES HERE] Group=[YOUR GROUP GOES HERE] ExecStart=/usr/bin/geth --fast --cache=1024 --rpc 2>/var/log/geth.log [Install] WantedBy=default.target
Please notice that you need to replace your username (or root evenutally) and password in listing above.
Enabling the Service & Launch
Finally I enable & start the service with:
sudo systemctl enable geth && sudo systemctl start geth
Disabling the Service & Stop
I case you every decide that you don’t need to terminate the service:
sudo systemctl disable geth && sudo systemctl stop geth
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