# Shepherd

Here we record information on running shepherd (on Debian).

# Tags

* assigned: pjotrp, efraimf
* type: documentation
* keywords: system, shepherd
* status: wip
* priority: normal

# Issues

* [ ] Currently guix system is started up using sudo as a shepherd user. This may be resolved in time when we start to use full Guix solutions

# Quick overview

On Debian the GNU shepherd can run in systemd as a 'shepherd' user because we typically run (system) containers that have root inside them.

```
systemctl status user-shepherd.service
```

the systemd file can therefore look like:

```
[Unit]
Description=Launch user shepherd daemon
Wants=guix-daemon.service

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/var/guix/profiles/per-user/shepherd/guix-profile/bin/shepherd
User=shepherd
Group=shepherd
LimitNOFILE=8000

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
```

One advantage of using a normal user is that it is easy to test configurations as a different user on the same machine!

There is currently a systemd service to automatically start shepherd
on system boot-up. A copy of the service lives in the shepherd-service
repository.

The process for deploying the services after creating the shepherd user is

```
symlink shepherd-services/shepherd to $HOME/.config/shepherd
symlink shepherd-services/cron to $home/.config/cron
symlink shepherd-services/*sh to $HOME
```

When shepherd starts up it should start all the services. So currently
that's bnw, gitea, ipfs, power, rn6app, singlecell and the mcron
services, gitea-dump and pubmed.

To use shepherd's herd command the command is 'sudo -u shepherd
/home/shepherd/.guix-profile/bin/herd status'.

```
su shepherd
/home/shepherd/.guix-profile/bin/herd status
```

Adding a bash alias, such as "alias herd-herd='sudo -u shepherd /home/shepherd/.guix-profile/bin/herd'", will make it easier to interact with shepherd without needing to switch to the shepherd user. The logs for the various shepherd services are located in /home/shepherd/logs/ but are not yet timestamped. The log for shepherd itself is in /home/shepherd/.config/shepherd/shepherd.log. There is not yet a way to change this from a config file.