No way to auto-restart Worker Service running as Windows Service on failure

[erikmf12]

Currently when running a worker service as a windows service there is no way to configure the service to restart on failure. Setting Environment.ExitCode = -1 doesn't work. Even if it did, there's no built-in way to tell if a BackgroundService failed expectedly or not unless you try/catch and set the exit code manually (since an exception is thrown away and the host exits with code 0).

Is there a way we can tap into the ServiceBase somehow and set the service to restart on failure? Or at least signal to windows that the exit is not a graceful one?

I need my windows service to be up 24/7 and currently when something fails there's no way to restart it automatically using SCM. Restarting would be fine, but having it fail and requiring a manual start after a period of downtime is unacceptable.

I couldn't figure out the best area label to add to this issue. If you have write-permissions please help me learn by adding exactly one area label.

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Issue Details

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Currently when running a worker service as a windows service there is no way to configure the service to restart on failure. Setting Environment.ExitCode = -1 doesn't work. Even if it did, there's no built-in way to tell if a BackgroundService failed expectedly or not unless you try/catch and set the exit code manually (since an exception is thrown away and the host exits with code 0).

Is there a way we can tap into the ServiceBase somehow and set the service to restart on failure? Or at least signal to windows that the exit is not a graceful one?

I need my windows service to be up 24/7 and currently when something fails there's no way to restart it automatically using SCM. Restarting would be fine, but having it fail and requiring a manual start after a period of downtime is unacceptable.

Author:	erikmf12
Assignees:	-
Labels:	area-System.ServiceProcess, untriaged
Milestone:	-

[eerhardt]

@dotnet/area-system-serviceprocess - is there a way for a Windows Service to automatically restart on failure?

[maikschott]

Stephen Cleary wrote a blog post how the WindowsServiceLifetime can be altered (or in this case subclassed) to trigger the SCM recovery actions: https://blog.stephencleary.com/2020/06/servicebase-gotcha-recovery-actions.html