To manage your daemon on a modern Linux system, you will use systemctl, the control interface for systemd. With systemctl, you can enable your service to start on boot, start or stop it immediately, reload its configuration, or check its current status. Here are the most common commands:

• Enable: systemctl enable your-daemon.service will configure your daemon to launch automatically at boot;
• Disable: systemctl disable your-daemon.service will prevent your daemon from starting at boot;
• Start: systemctl start your-daemon.service immediately starts the daemon process;
• Stop: systemctl stop your-daemon.service immediately stops the daemon process;
• Reload: systemctl reload your-daemon.service sends a signal to reload the daemon's configuration without stopping it (if supported);
• Status: systemctl status your-daemon.service displays whether the daemon is running, its recent logs, and other metadata.

Understanding these core commands is essential for reliable daemon administration.

When your daemon does not behave as expected, you need to investigate its logs. journalctl is the primary tool for viewing logs collected by systemd for all services, including your daemon.

With journalctl -u your-daemon.service, you can see all log entries for your service, making it easier to trace issues, review output, or troubleshoot crashes. You can add flags like -f to follow logs in real time or --since to see logs from a specific date. This approach centralizes logs and simplifies troubleshooting compared to traditional log files.