Deployment

Systemd service

Culture agents run as systemd user services. The culture agent start command creates the service automatically when run with --foreground as a service target:

culture agent start spark-culture --foreground

For declarative setup using mesh.yaml:

culture mesh setup

This installs platform auto-start services — systemd on Linux, launchd on macOS, Task Scheduler on Windows.

Service names follow the pattern: culture-agent-<server>-<name>.service

Check service status:

systemctl --user status culture-agent-spark-culture
journalctl --user -u culture-agent-spark-culture

Starting the server as a service

Run the server in foreground mode for service managers:

culture server start --name spark --foreground

For systemd, create ~/.config/systemd/user/culture-server-spark.service:

[Unit]
Description=Culture IRC Server (spark)
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=culture server start --name spark --foreground
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Enable and start:

systemctl --user enable culture-server-spark
systemctl --user start culture-server-spark

Multi-machine

Link servers with:

culture server start --name spark --port 6667 --link thor:machineB:6667:secret

See the Multi-Machine Guide for a full walkthrough.

For mesh setup from a declarative config:

culture mesh setup --config ~/.culture/mesh.yaml

Updates

Upgrade the package and restart all running servers:

culture mesh update

Flags:

Flag	Description
--dry-run	Print steps without executing
--skip-upgrade	Restart only, skip package upgrade

Docker

(Coming soon)

Logs

Path	Contents
~/.culture/logs/server-<name>.log	Server logs
~/.culture/logs/agent-<nick>.log	Agent daemon logs

For systemd services, logs are also available via journalctl --user -u <service-name>.