Command-Line Watson Explorer Engine Administration Commands

This section describes some of the Watson™ Explorer Engine functions that can be performed from the command prompt. Commands that are discussed in this section include engine-start, engine-shutdown, engine-cmd, engine-export, engine-import, engine-status, generate-key, embedded-webserver, and embedded-webserver-config.
Important: When using any Watson Explorer Engine command-line administrative commands, encountering an error such as (ID: API_INVALID_SU_TOKEN) The current session could not be authenticated with a su-token often indicates that the Watson Explorer Engine installation was initialized using a configuration api-url whose hostname or IP address can no longer be resolved from the system on which Watson Explorer Engine is installed. You can eliminate this error message by using the embedded-webserver-config command.

Watson Explorer Engine provides two commands that can be used from any command prompt to start or stop Watson Explorer Engine on a given system. These commands are easily integrated into a system's startup and shutdown procedures to guarantee the availability of Watson Explorer Engine or other applications that use Watson Explorer Engine. These applications are the engine-start and engine-shutdown commands, which are located in the bin subdirectory of your Watson Explorer Engine installation directory.

Note: The engine-start command always starts the embedded Watson Explorer Engine web server if the web server is installed and enabled. For more information about configuring and enabling this embedded web server, see Configuring the Watson Explorer Engine Embedded Web Server. You can also use the embedded-webserver-config command to start, stop, and restart the embedded web server manually.

On Linux and Microsoft Windows systems, you can run the engine-start and engine-shutdown commands as any user that has write access to the data/su-tokens subdirectory of the Watson Explorer Engine installation that you are starting or stopping. This is typically the user that you installed the Watson Explorer Engine software as. The root user on Linux systems and the Administrator user on Microsoft Windows systems should always have write access to this directory.

Note: When you shut down Watson Explorer Engine, it records the reason for that shut down in files that are named maintenance-mode and are located in the top level and bin directories of /path/to/engine/installation. The presence of these files indicates that Watson Explorer Engine has been shut down cleanly.

The next sections provide complete reference information for Watson Explorer Engine command-line startup and shutdown commands. For information about integrating these commands into your system's startup process, see Integrating Watson Explorer Into the System Startup and Shutdown Process. A subsequent section also discusses the embedded-webserver command, which can be used to manually start, stop, and restart the Watson Explorer Engine embedded web server. For information about configuring the embedded web server, see Configuring the Watson Explorer Engine Embedded Web Server.

Watson Explorer Engine provides single commands that enable you to start and stop all of its processes in an orderly fashion. For information about the command that is used to start Watson Explorer Engine, see engine-start. For information about the command that is used to shut down Watson Explorer Engine, see engine-shutdown. For information about integrating these commands into your system's startup process, see Integrating Watson Explorer Into the System Startup and Shutdown Process.

Tip: The engine-shutdown command ordinarily signals all running Watson Explorer Engine processes to terminate cleanly, which enables these processes to checkpoint in-progress work. If you need to terminate all Watson Explorer Engine processes immediately, you can use the --force option with the command. However, using the --force option might require extra time when restarting Watson Explorer Engine because the Watson Explorer Engine processes might need to recover and resubmit in-progress work.