Startup options

Startup options

This topic discusses options for starting Splunk and Splunk server processes after a new installation.

By convention, this document uses:

• $SPLUNK_HOME to identify the path to your Splunk installation.
• $SPLUNK_HOME/bin/ to indicate the location of the command line interface.

Add Splunk to your shell path

Before you continue, you may want to set a SPLUNK_HOME environment variable and add $SPLUNK_HOME/bin to your shell's path. The example below works for bash users who accepted the default installation location. Use the correct syntax and path for your own installation.

# export SPLUNK_HOME=/opt/splunk
# export PATH=$SPLUNK_HOME/bin:$PATH

Start Splunk

To start Splunk, use the command line interface:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start

Splunk displays the license agreement and prompts you to accept the before the startup sequence continues.

To automatically accept the license when you start Splunk for the first time, add the accept-license option to the start command:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start --accept-license

The startup sequence displays:

Checking prerequisites...
Checking http port [8000]: open
Checking mgmt port [8089]: open
Verifying configuration.  This may take a while...
Finished verifying configuration.
Checking index directory...
Verifying databases...
Verified databases: _audit, _blocksignature, _internal, _thefishbucket, history, main, sampledata, splunklogger, summary
Checking index files
All index checks passed.
All preliminary checks passed.
Starting splunkd...
Starting splunkweb...
Splunk Server started. 
The Splunk web interface is at http://<hostname>:8000 
If you get stuck, we're here to help.  Feel free to email us at 'support@splunk.com'.

There are two other start options: no-prompt and answer-yes:

• If you run $SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start --no-prompt, Splunk proceeds with startup until it requires you to answer a question. Then, it displays the question, why it is quitting, and quits.
• If you run SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start --answer-yes, Splunk proceeds with startup and automatically answers "yes" to all yes/no questions. Splunk displays the question and answer as it continues.

If you run start with all three options in one line, for example:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start --answer-yes --no-prompt --accept-license

• Splunk does not ask you to accept the license.
• Splunk answers yes to any yes/no question.
• Splunk quits when it encounters a non-yes/no question.

Start and disable individual processes

You can start and stop individual Splunk processes by adding the process as an object to the start command. The objects include:

• splunkd, the Splunk server daemon.
• splunkweb, Splunk's Web interface process.
• watchdog, a keep-alive process that restarts splunkd if it shuts down. When it notices the splunkd pid no longer exists, it will try up to three times to restart splunkd. This option does not work on Windows. Instead, set recovery options in the Service Management console.

For example, to start only splunkd:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start splunkd

To disable splunkweb:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk disable webserver

Or to start Splunk watchdog:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk start watchdog

To shutdown watchdog, use the following command:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk stop watchdog

For more information about start, refer to the CLI help page:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk help start

Open Splunk in a Web browser

After Splunk starts, it displays the URL for Splunk Web at the end of its startup summary:

The Splunk web interface is at http://<hostname>:<port> 

Note that <hostname> is specific to the machine on which you've installed Splunk and <port> is the HTTP port you defined at installation. The HTTP port defaults to 8000 if not otherwise specified.

To access Splunk Web, open a Web browser to this URL. Refer to the System Requirements for the list of supported Web browsers for your operating system.

To begin using Splunk, refer to the User Manual and Splunk Tutorial.

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