Litestream

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.

Note: Litestream v0.3.x provided an .msi installer that registered the service automatically. Starting with v0.5.x, releases ship as a .zip archive and you register the service manually using the steps below.

Installing the binary

Download the Windows .zip archive from the Litestream releases page. Choose the file matching your architecture—x86_64 for Intel/AMD or arm64 for ARM:

litestream-0.5.14-windows-x86_64.zip
litestream-0.5.14-windows-arm64.zip

Extract the archive and copy litestream.exe to C:\Litestream. In PowerShell (replace x86_64 with arm64 if you downloaded the ARM archive):

Expand-Archive litestream-0.5.14-windows-x86_64.zip
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path C:\Litestream -Force
Copy-Item litestream-0.5.14-windows-x86_64\litestream.exe C:\Litestream\

Creating the configuration file

When running as a service, Litestream reads its configuration file from:

C:\Litestream\litestream.yml

Create this file with your database and replica settings before starting the service. See the configuration reference for all available options.

Registering the service

Register and start the service from an elevated (Run as Administrator) PowerShell or Command Prompt:

sc.exe create Litestream binPath= "C:\Litestream\litestream.exe" start= auto
sc.exe start Litestream

Note that sc.exe requires the space after each = sign.

Managing the service

Whenever you update the configuration 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.

Screenshot of Windows Services application

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 v0.5.14...
    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 .zip archive from the Litestream releases page, extract litestream.exe, 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.

See Also

← Running as a Systemd service
Directory Watcher →