Getting started

After installation all configuration is placed under /etc/marche, which contains the general configuration (general.conf) and example files for many types of services. See Configuration for detailed information about the config files and the general config values.

A systemd service for the marche server is installed as /lib/systemd/system/marched.service. If you installed the Debian package, it was automatically added to the boot procedure.

To start the daemon manually, run:

marched [-c configdir] [-d] [-v]

The config directory is usually /etc/marche but can be changed by -c. The -d switch will daemonize the process, and the -v switch activates verbose logging.

The Marche daemon writes logfiles; with the default configuration they go to /var/log/marche, but this can be configured differently.

Additionally, marche’s bundled graphical user interface is installed as marche-gui.

You should start now by checking (and possibly changing) the general configuration (general.conf) and configuring your services (see Configuration and Available jobs).

Marche’s concept of services is that you configure one or more jobs, which can each provide one or more (usually similar) services. For example, the simple “init-script” job only provides one service, i.e., the service controlled by the init script it is configured to use. Other, more high-level, jobs, can use knowledge of details to scan the system and provide multiple services that belong together.

To test your configuration, you can start marche-gui which will find your server automatically (if you activated the UDP interface and it’s within your own network). If you didn’t activate the UDP interface, see Graphical user interface for instructions how to add a specific host.