Running as a Windows Service

This guide will get you running Litestream on the Windows operating system as either a command line tool or as a background Windows Service.

Prerequisites#

This guide assumes you have read the Getting Started tutorial already. Please read that to understand the basic operation of Litestream.

Running as a Windows Service#

Running Litestream as a Windows Service means that it will run in the background and continuously monitor and replicate your databases. This is the recommended way to run Litestream.

To install, download and run the .msi installer from the Litestream releases page. You’ll be presented with a window asking if the app can make changes to your device. Click “Yes”.

Once the installer is done, your Litesteam service will be running. The configuration file for Litestream is installed at:

C:\Litestream\litestream.yml

Managing the service#

When you first install Litestream, it will run using an empty configuration file. Whenever you update this file, you’ll need to restart the service.

Go to the Services application and select the Litestream service. You should see links in the sidebar to Stop and Restart the service.

Viewing the event log#

The Litestream service logs informational and error messages to the Windows Event Log during operation. You can view these events in either the Event Viewer application or you can view them from PowerShell.

In PowerShell, you can execute the following:

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source Litestream

This will show events in reverse chronological order:

PS C:\> Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source Litestream

   Index Time          EntryType   Source                 InstanceID Message
   ----- ----          ---------   ------                 ---------- -------
    8894 Jan 01 00:00  Information Litestream                      1 replicating to: name="s3" type="s3" bucket="dev...
    8892 Jan 01 00:00  Information Litestream                      1 initialized db: C:\my.db...
    8891 Jan 01 00:00  Information Litestream                      1 litestream v0.3.13...
    8890 Jan 01 00:00  Information Litestream                      1 Litestream service starting...

Running from the command line#

If you do not wish to run as a background service or you only need to perform a database restore then you can download the Litestream executable and run from the command line.

You’ll need to download the litestream.exe file from the Litestream releases page and install it within your Windows %PATH%. The executable will use C:\Litestream\litestream.yml as the default configuration path but you can override that with the -config flag.

All logging messages will go to the terminal window when running from the command line and the Event Log is not used.