winsvcwrap

This is an open source replacement for SRVANY.EXE.

Description of SRVANY

SRVANY.EXE was a proprietary tool included in the Windows 2003 Resource Kit and no longer maintained by Microsoft. It also came with a utility INSTSRV.EXE which installs services which use SRVANY.EXE.

The INSTSRV utility used the following arguments:

instsrv <service-name> <path-to-SRVANY.EXE> [-a <account-name>] [-p <account-password>]
instsrv <service-name> remove

This creates a service using SRVANY as the service executable.

Windows stores service configuration information in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<service-name>. SRVANY needs these configuration parameters to be added to its key, beyond the standard Windows ones:

• Parameters\Application: String. Required. The actual service executable to launch and be supervised by SRVANY.
• Parameters\AppParameters: String. Optional. Parameters to pass to the actual service executable.
• Parameters\AppEnvironment: Multi-String. Optional. Environment variables to pass to the actual service executable.
• Parameters\AppDirectory: String. Optional. Working directory to run actual service executable under.

Description of winsvcwrap

winsvcwrap is a simple Go daemon which can be hosted as a Windows service and which spawns and supervises one other process. It uses hlandau/service and inherits its Windows service support from there.

winsvcwrap -service.*=...

For simplicity, arguments are taken from the service command line rather than separate registry keys as in the SRVANY case. The following command line arguments are supported:

winsvcwrap
  -winsvcwrap.run=...             Windows commandline to spawn (quote both EXE and arguments).
  -winsvcwrap.arg=...             Add an argument to the command to spawn. May be specified multiple times.
  -winsvcwrap.cwd=...             Set current working directory to this before spawning (optional).
  -winsvcwrap.capturestdout=1     If set, stdout from the supervised process is captured and each line is
                                    sent to xlog.
  -winsvcwrap.capturestderr=1     If set, stderr from the supervised process is captured and each line is
                                    sent to xlog.

winsvcwrap will propagate failures. That is, if the spawned process fails for any reason, winsvcwrap will also fail and exit so that the Windows service management system can detect this failure, log it, and restart the entire hierarchy, winsvcwrap and all.

winsvcwrap generates log output using xlog, so you can logs its (small number of) log messages using any method supported by xlog. This is separate from the logging of the daemon it supervises.

TODO

• Send the Windows equivalent of SIGINT instead of just terminating the child process. This appears to be hard to do.

Licence

Licenced under the GPLv3 or later.

© 2021 Hugo Landau