Windows Services with Nuitka

In your code, you do not do anything special. If you have previously used something like win32service, remove this. Nuitka handles all interaction with the system for you.

try:
    while True:
        # Do your service work here as you would normally do it,
        # of course trying to not busy loop.
        ...
        time.sleep(1)

except KeyboardInterrupt:
    # Service is being stopped, e.g. shutdown, manual
    # you have a little time for cleanups until getting hard killed.
    ...

The plugin enables the creation of Windows Service executables, which you can do manually like this:

sc.exe \\myserver create NewService binpath= c:\some_path\NewServ.exe

Note

The created binary also has a hidden parameter install that will delete the existing service (for updates) and create it automatically with the binary path set correctly, and therefore it will be relatively easy. Extra arguments passed after install become arguments passed to the service at run time.

Every other configuration of the service could be added, but it would take work and somebody to fund my time this. For now, this is mainly intended for simple use cases and internal automatic testing of the plugin.

Note

There are options to force the output of the service to standard output and standard error into specified files. For debugging, you can specify e.g. --windows-force-stdout-spec='%PROGRAM%.out.txt' and --windows-force-stderr-spec='%PROGRAM%.err.txt'. Refer to the User Manual of Nuitka for allowed special monikers. Of course, absolute paths are allowed too.

The plugin is enabled with --enable-plugin=windows-service and has a required parameter --windows-service-name which will be used as the service name.

Combine this with --windows-company-name and ideally all related options to provide a proper version resource.

Note

The created binary does not run directly anymore, but only when launched as a Windows service.

Go back to Nuitka commercial overview to learn about more features or to subscribe to Nuitka commercial.