Command line to start/stop Streaming Engine 4.8.0

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

I am experiencing something odd when using the command line to start/stop Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.0. When prompted by the installer, I specified “n” when asked “Start Wowza Streaming Engine automatically [Y/n]:”.

So when I use this command to start the service:

sudo service WowzaStreamingEngineManager start

Port 8088 works correctly but port 1935 is not alive. The 8088 web page says that Streaming Engine is not running.

And when I type in this additional command, everything seems to work correctly. This is the command I used on 4.7.8.

sudo systemctl restart WowzaStreamingEngine.service

And if I go the other way (systemctl resrtart only), I get the opposite behavior (responds to 1935 but not 8088). It looks like there are two separate systems that are starting differently. And what’s the right way to take the system down?

This is a new 4.8.0 install on a on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04.3 system, developer license, running in a cloud server.

2

I’ll get this in front of our documentation team. We are working on fully transitioning away from our PDF guides, so all of this information will eventually be available via HTML.

3

Works! This answer is why I love this forum.

It would be nice if this page could be updated with your information.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-start-and-stop-wowza-streaming-engine-software#startServLin

4

Systemd has been around for about 10 years now, and “systemctl” to control services has since long replaced older commands like “service start” or “/etc/init.d/… start”. So my recommendation is to use “systemctl” only - even though “service … start” still works, even if it’s to safe yourself from confusion.

Wowza has two separate processes - they aren’t the same:

  • WowzaStreamingEngine: this is the actual media server process (by default uses port 1935 for Streaming)

  • WowzaStreamingEngineManager: this is the control website that you can open on port 8088

You must start both. Unless you don’t want to control your Wowza instance via the web-interface in which case you can leave the latter inactive.

See the Wowza Streaming Engine Users Guide pages 26 and 62 (although they still use “service start” there)

$ sudo systemctl start WowzaStreamingEngine
$ sudo systemctl start WowzaStreamingEngineManager
5

Thanks for sharing this. The documentation is updated to reflect this implementation: https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-start-and-stop-wowza-streaming-engine-software