I was looking for a good system to benchmark my application recently, and InfluxDB combined with Grafana seemed like a really good solution. I decided to set it up on my Google Compute Engine instance. I must note that using a Docker image would probably be much, much simpler than installing components individually. I highly recommend going the Docker way.
I installed InfluxDB as shown on their site on one of my machines and things worked just as mentioned on the site. However, on my other Google Compute Engine instance, it didn’t. InfluxDB did not install as a service, and I couldn’t get it to start as a service either.
I tried using systemctl:
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$ sudo systemctl start influxd
Failed to get D-Bus connection: No connection to service manager.
I searched about this issue on many sites (like this and this) and concluded that systemctl would be of no use to me.
I decided to add a script for InfluxDB myself. I started looking for any files on the web that matched /etc/init.d/influxd and couldn’t find anything. After digging around I noticed that the init.sh script in the InfluxDB GitHub Repository looked a lot like an LSB script. I decided to try it out. I created a new file:
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sudo vim /etc/init.d/influxd
I copied the init.sh script linked above into this file and set it as an executable:
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sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/influxd
Now I could start up InfluxDB as a service! I started it using:
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$ sudo service influxd start
Starting the process influxdb [ OK ]
influxdb process was started [ OK ]
$ ps -ef|grep influx
influxdb 8406 1 0 08:58 pts/11 00:00:00 /usr/bin/influxd -pidfile /var/run/influxdb/influxd.pid -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf
$ curl -i 'http://localhost:8086/ping'
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Request-Id: fcdd016c-98d2-11e5-8001-000000000000
X-Influxdb-Version: 0.9.5.1
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2015 08:59:25 GMT
$ sudo service influxd status
influxdb Process is running [ OK ]
Everything seems to be working just fine! Hope this helps someone else struggling to start InfluxDB as a service on a machine that isn’t booting with systemd, and InfluxDB isn’t installing as a service as expected.