Windows service installation

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Would there be any interest in a patch to libbeats to allow beats to self install themselves as a Windows Service? My reasoning is two-fold:

  1. Removes the need to ship a Powershell script along with the binary.

  2. Installation is possible on older Windows machines without Powershell installed.

It might make this issue easier to resolve as well:

The idea would be to allow, for example, .\filebeat.exe install and .\filebeat.exe uninstall.

I have the basics up and running here on my dev machine.

2

I think there is some interest in this, but @andrewkroh is probably best to comment?

3

I'm pretty sure that at some point I brought the idea of using a parameter to install the service. It must have been in conversation because I couldn't find it in any comments. But I think @tudor wanted to keep the installation process separate from the Beat. Maybe @tudor recalls or has some ideas here.

I was thinking something along the lines of:

  • .\filebeat.exe -winsvc=install
  • .\filebeat.exe -winsvc=start
  • .\filebeat.exe -winsvc=stop
  • .\filebeat.exe -winsvc=uinstall
4

Hi @andrewkroh, i see that there is the need of having a installer for beats. Here also. I have locally add a feature on my machine to create msi packages for the .exe files which also install them as a service. It's based on Wix. Are you interested in such a feature?