[//] # [//] # Copyright (C) 2004-2023 The Cacti Group [//] #

PHP has matured over the years, and in the year 2020, it is now possible to create reliable services leveraging it. Cacti for years used crontab as a launcher primarily due to the issues we had experienced in the early days of PHP 4.2 with constant memory leaks with the core PHP and the various PHP modules that were in use. However, times are changing.

With the advent of technologies such as MariaDB Galera, keepalived, haproxy, and database session management for fault tolerant web server and databases, and with clustered file systems like GlusterFS and CEPH for RRDfile and web site content fault tolerance, the idea of a fully distributed highly available Cacti is now possible.

Add to that, the concept of Remote Data Collectors for network resiliency, and Cacti has fully entering into what I refer to as 'enterprise' class in it's stability and reliability.

However, to more easily support keepalived, we need to move away from the crontab based setup Cacti has used for nearly 20 years. Long live Crontab!

Just about all Linux variants that are out there today use systemd. The systemd model makes creating and installing a service very convenient. There are only a few steps. For this service here they are.

1. Copy the cactid.service file to /usr/lib/systemd/system
2. Modify the file to point to the real path of the cactid.php file located in the cacti base directory by default
3. Modify the file to use the user and group that your Cacti is installed with, on RedHat variants, it usually: apache:apache, for Debian variants, its generally www-run:www
4. Create the file /etc/sysconfig/cactid, even though it's not used today, we'll keep it there for as a future path to over write certain settings
5. Install the service using 'systemctl enable cactid'
6. Reload systemd using 'systemctl daemon-reload'
7. Comment out the cacti crontab file or simply remove the /etc/cron.d/cacti file in place today
8. Start the service using 'systemctl start cactid'

If you are interested in seeing what the cactid service is doing, you can place it into debug mode using the following instructions:

1. Stop the cactid service 'systemctl stop cactid'
2. Switch directories to the Cacti top directory, by default /var/www/html/cacti
3. Run the cactid service in foreground mode: ./cactid.php --foreground --debug

What it does is pretty simple.

Today, the cactid service does not include Windows support, though the PHP Windows project does provide a PHP module to install and enable a PHP based Windows services. We would be glad to accept a pull request and additional instructions for supporting this service on Windows.

You know I say it too often, but thanks for using Cacti!