The vast.service provides a systemd service unit for running VAST as system service. The service is sandboxed and runs with limited privileges.

Please note that all subsequent commands require root privileges. The service requires a user and group called vast. You can create them as follows.

useradd --system --user-group vast

Make sure that you don't grant any special rights to this user, i.e., do not enable sudo or other privileged commands for this user.

Once the user exists, you should create the directory for VAST's persistent data storage and change the permissions such that it is owned by the new vast user.

mkdir -p {/var/lib/vast,/var/log/vast}
chown -R vast:vast {/var/lib/vast,/var/log/vast}

As described above, the systemd unit is configured to allow certain write paths for logging and file storage. This also has to be configured in VAST. Use the provided vast.yaml file.

The default configuration directory for VAST is /etc/vast. Place the configuration file in there. Make sure that the new vast user can read the contents of /etc/vast/vast.yaml.

Before you begin, find the line beginning with ExecStart= at the very bottom of the [Service] section in the unit file. Depending on your installation path you might need to change the location of the vast binary and configuration file.

ExecStart=/path/to/vast --config=/path/to/vast.yaml start

Then copy (or symlink) the unit file to /etc/systemd/system.

ln -s $(echo $PWD)/vast.service /etc/systemd/system

To have the service start up automatically with system boot, you can enable it via systemd. Otherwise, just start it to run it immediately.

systemctl enable vast
systemctl start vast