Running Logstash as a Service on Debian or RPM

Logstash is not started automatically after installation. Starting and stopping Logstash depends on the init system of the underlying operating system, which is now systemd.

As systemd is now the de-facto init system, here are some common operating systems and versions that use it. This list is intended to be informative, not exhaustive.


Distribution	Service System
Ubuntu 16.04 and newer	systemd
Debian 8 "jessie" and newer	systemd
CentOS (and RHEL) 7 and newer	systemd

Running Logstash by Using Systemd

Distributions like Debian Jessie, Ubuntu 15.10+, and many of the SUSE derivatives use systemd and the systemctl command to start and stop services. Logstash places the systemd unit files in /etc/systemd/system for both deb and rpm. After installing the package, you can start up Logstash with:

sudo systemctl start logstash.service