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.

Advanced Logging

On many Linux systems the bot can be configured to send its log messages to syslog or journald system services. Logging to a remote syslog server is also available on Windows. The special values for the --logfilename command line option can be used for this.

Logging to syslog

To send Freqtrade log messages to a local or remote syslog service use the --logfilename command line option with the value in the following format:

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

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

  • tail -f /var/log/user, or
  • install a comprehensive graphical viewer (for instance, 'Log File Viewer' for Ubuntu).

On many systems syslog (rsyslog) fetches data from journald (and vice versa), so both --logfilename syslog or --logfilename journald can be used and the messages be viewed with both journalctl and a syslog viewer utility. You can combine this in any way which suites you better.

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 a single message when nothing else happens with the bot. To achieve this, set in /etc/rsyslog.conf: 

# Filter duplicated messages
$RepeatedMsgReduction on

Logging to journald

This needs the systemd python package installed as the dependency, which is not available on Windows. Hence, the whole journald logging functionality is not available for a bot running on Windows.

To send Freqtrade log messages to journald system service use the --logfilename command line option with the value in the following format:

  • --logfilename journald -- send log messages to journald.

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

  • journalctl -f -- shows Freqtrade log messages sent to journald along with other log messages fetched by journald.
  • journalctl -f -u freqtrade.service -- this command can be used when the bot is run as a systemd service.

There are many other options in the journalctl utility to filter the messages, see manual pages for this utility.

On many systems syslog (rsyslog) fetches data from journald (and vice versa), so both --logfilename syslog or --logfilename journald can be used and the messages be viewed with both journalctl and a syslog viewer utility. You can combine this in any way which suites you better.