stable/docs/advanced-setup.md

Advanced Post-installation Tasks

This page explains some advanced tasks and configuration options that can be performed after the bot installation and may be uselful in some environments.

If you do not know what things mentioned here mean, you probably do not need it.

Configure the bot running as a systemd service

Copy the freqtrade.service file to your systemd user directory (usually ~/.config/systemd/user) and update WorkingDirectory and ExecStart to match your setup.

!!! Note Certain systems (like Raspbian) don't load service unit files from the user directory. In this case, copy freqtrade.service into /etc/systemd/user/ (requires superuser permissions).

After that you can start the daemon with:

systemctl --user start freqtrade

For this to be persistent (run when user is logged out) you'll need to enable linger for your freqtrade user.

sudo loginctl enable-linger "$USER"

If you run the bot as a service, you can use systemd service manager as a software watchdog monitoring freqtrade bot state and restarting it in the case of failures. If the internals.sd_notify parameter is set to true in the configuration or the --sd-notify command line option is used, the bot will send keep-alive ping messages to systemd using the sd_notify (systemd notifications) protocol and will also tell systemd its current state (Running or Stopped) when it changes.

The freqtrade.service.watchdog file contains an example of the service unit configuration file which uses systemd as the watchdog.

!!! Note The sd_notify communication between the bot and the systemd service manager will not work if the bot runs in a Docker container.

Logging to syslog or journald

On many systems the bot can be configured to send its log messages to syslog or journald. The special values for the --logfilename option can be used for this:

• --logfilename journald -- send log messages to journald. This needs the systemd python package installed as the dependency. Not available on Windows.

• --logfilename syslog:<syslog_address> -- send log messages to syslog server using the <syslog_address> as syslog address.

The syslog address can be either a Unix domain socket (socket filename) or a UDP socket specification, consisting of IP address and UDP port, separated by the ':' character.

So, the following are the examples of possible usages:

• --logfilename syslog:/dev/log -- log to syslog (rsyslog) using the /dev/log socket, suitable for most systems.
• --logfilename syslog -- same as above, the shortcut for /dev/log.
• --logfilename syslog:/var/run/syslog -- log to syslog (rsyslog) using the /var/run/syslog socket. Use this on MacOS.
• --logfilename syslog:localhost:514 -- log to local syslog using UDP socket, if it listens on port 514.
• --logfilename syslog:<ip>:514 -- log to remote syslog at IP address and port 514. This may be used on Windows for remote logging to external syslog server.

Log messages are send to journald and syslog with the user facility. So you can see them with the following commands:

• tail -f /var/log/user, or install a comprehansive graphical viewer (for instance, 'Log File Viewer' for Ubuntu) for the syslog case;
• journalctl -f when logging to journald.

On many systems rsyslog (syslog) fetches data from journald, so both --logfilename syslog or --logfilename journald can be used and the messages be viewed with both journalctl and the syslog viewer utility.

For rsyslog the messages from the bot can be redirected into a separate dedicated log file. To achieve this, add

if $programname startswith "freqtrade" then -/var/log/freqtrade.log

to one of the rsyslog configuration files, for example at the end of the /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf.

For syslog (rsyslog), the reduction mode can be switched on. This will reduce the number of repeating messages. For instance, multiple bot Heartbeat messages will be reduced to the single message when nothing else happens with the bot. To achieve this, set in /etc/rsyslog.conf:

# Filter duplicated messages
$RepeatedMsgReduction on