Command-Line Watson Explorer Engine Administration Commands

Note: See Additional Command-Line Tools for information about the command-line tools available in Watson Explorer Engine version 11.0.0.3 or later.

This section describes some of the Watson Explorer Engine functions that can be performed from the command prompt. Commands discussed in this section include velocity-startup, velocity-shutdown, velocity-webserver, and velocity-cmd. A related command, velocity-config command, discussed in the context of the Configuring Watson Explorer Engine's Embedded Web Server documentation, enables you to set the configuration variables that provide mandatory information for Watson Explorer Engine components such as the embedded web server and modules such as Watson Explorer Results Module.

Important: When using any of Watson Explorer Engine's 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 velocity-config command, as described in velocity-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, and which are designed to be 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 velocity-startup and velocity-shutdown commands, which are located in the bin subdirectory of your Watson Explorer Engine installation directory.

Note: The velocity-startup command will always start 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 Watson Explorer Engine's Embedded Web Server. You can also use the velocity-webserver command to start, stop, and restart the embedded web server manually.

On Linux and Microsoft Windows systems, you can execute the velocity-startup and velocity-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 named maintenance-mode that 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's 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 velocity-webserver command, which can be used to manually start, stop, and restart Watson Explorer Engine's embedded web server. For information about configuring the embedded web server, see Configuring Watson Explorer Engine's 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 used to start Watson Explorer Engine, see velocity-startup. For information about the command used to shut down Watson Explorer Engine, see velocity-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 velocity-shutdown 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 velocity-shutdown's --force option. However, using the --force option may require additional time when restarting Watson Explorer Engine because the Watson Explorer Engine processes may need to recover and resubmit in-progress work.