How to run python applications as system service in CentOS 7 or RHEL 7 ?

I started developing python applications from 2012. During my learning period, I was using screen in linux for running my python applications in the background. Majority of my colleagues were also following the same approach for running applications in background. The advantage of this approach was its easiness. But these screens will go away if the system gets rebooted. Also these applications will never get started on boot.

Systemd is a system and service manager for CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. This the first process that gets started after the system boots. This is compatible with the SysV init scripts used by CentOS 6 and RHEL 6.

It is very easy to run any custom application as a system service. In this way, the management will become very easy.

Suppose I have a python flask application app.py and I want to run it as a system service. I want to run this application under my unix user account amal.  

The contents of app.py is given below.




My code is located in the location /home/amal. Usually in case of any production deployment, the code will not be kept in the user home directory. This is to explain the scenario of running the application as a non root user.

The command to run my application is

python app.py 

For running in production mode with a WSGI like gunicorn, the command will be

gunicorn app:app --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 -w 2

For running this application as system service. We just need to do the following steps.

Create a file myapp.service in the location /etc/systemd/system/ The content of myapp.service is given below.


Now save the file and execute the following command. The following command will reload all the systemd configurations.

systemctl daemon-reload

Now we can start the application with the following command

systemctl start myapp

Now check the status of the application with the following command

systemctl status myapp

Also we can invoke the webservice using curl command.

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/

How to check the CPU and Memory utilization of a Linux system ?

One of the best and easiest way to perform the realtime CPU and Memory utilization  of a Linux system is by using htop command.

The command will provide an interactive user interface with the summary of load on the system and the details of individual process running on the system. This is very helpful to identify the resource utilization of the applications running in a system.

How to list all the indices in Elasticsearch ?

For listing all the indices from unix command line, type the following command.

curl -X GET http://eshost:9200/_cat/indices

For checking this from the browser, simply type the following URL in the browser

http://eshost:9200/_cat/indices

Where eshost is the hostname of the elasticsearch server. You can replace it with the IP address of the server also. 9200 is the default port used by elasticsearch

What is Inode in Linux ? How to check the Inode usage in Linux ?

The inode is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the object's data. File-system object attributes may include metadata (times of last change, access, modification), as well as owner and permission data. Inode is also known as Index node.

Directories are lists of names assigned to inodes. A directory contains an entry for itself, its parent, and each of its children. Sometimes, we may face space issue in disks which has storage space. Mostly this issue occurs because of inode filling. The file system might have storage space available, but the inode table does not have space.

The command to check the storage space is given below.

df -h

The command to check the inode usage is given below.

df -i

If the inode capacity of a disk is full, we will not be able to write any data to the disk. Usually this issue happens when we keep large number of small files.