Turn your program into a proper Windows™ service or "wrap" it with some helper tool to make it a Windows™ service.
The former is cleaner as it allows your program to actually be aware of control requests the Windows Service Management subsystem would send to you. You could also easily turn your program into a shrink-wrapped product, if/when needed. You could start with golang.org/x/sys/windows/svc
.
The latter may be a bit easier, but YMMV.
If you'd like to explore this way, look for tools like srvany
, nssm
, winsv
etc.
Note that of these, only srvany
is provided by Microsoft® and, AFAIK, it's missing since Win7, W2k8, so your best built-in bet might be messing with sc.exe
.
In either case, should you pick this route, you'll have to deal with the question of setting up proper permissions on your app's assets.
This question is reasonably complex in itself since there are many moving parts involved.
For a start, you have to make sure your assets are tried to be accessed not from "the process' current directory"—which may be essentially random when it runs as a service—but either from the place the process was explicitly told about when run (via command-line option or whatever) or figured out somehow using a reasonably engeneered guess (and this is a complicated topic in itself).
Next, you either have to make sure the account your Windows™ uses to run your service really has the permissions to access the place your assets are stored in.
Another possibility is to add a dedicated account and make the SCM use it for running your service.
Note that in either case proper error handling and their reporting is paramount: when your program is being run non-interactively, you want to know when something goes wrong: socket failed to be opened or listened on, assets not found, access was denied when trying to open an asset file, and so on—in all these cases you have to 1) handle the error, and 2) report it in a way you can deal with it.
For a non-interactive Windows™ program the best way may be to use the Event Log (say, via golang.org/x/sys/windows/svc/eventlog
).