Start & Stop a service

After the Init and PostInit stages have completed the deployment order of Service's in the kernel is confirmed and the kernel then enters the Start stage.

Starting a service

During this stage, the kernel checks each Service in the deployment order and checks to see if it implements the StartableService interface. If it does then it calls the services Start() function to allow the service to initialise itself, creating any resources it requires.

1type StartableService interface {
2    Start() error
3}

For example a service can open an external Database, load a configuration file or create a Webserver.

If a service has internal types that require initialisation like maps, then those maps must be initialised with a Start() method.

If an error occurs then the Start() method must close any resources it has already created and then return an error. The kernel will then enter the Stop stage to stop any service that has already started then return that error.

Stopping a service

Once the kernel has started a service in the Start stage, it also checks to see if the service implements the StoppableService interface. If it does it will add that service to an internal stop list which contains those services which have been started and require stopping during shutdown.

During shutdown, the stop list is called in reverse order so that the last service started will be stopped first.

1type StoppableService interface {
2    Stop()
3}