Use WINSW To Setup FRP As Windows Service

About:

WinSW is a util­ity that al­lows you to wrap and man­age a Win­dows ser­vice for any ex­e­cutable.

frpc is a client for the frp (Fast Re­verse Proxy) tool, which en­ables you to ex­pose lo­cal servers to the in­ter­net.

Procedure:

To set up frpc as a Win­dows ser­vice us­ing WinSW, fol­low these steps:

1. Download WinSW

• Download the latest release of WinSW from the releases page. Choose the appropriate executable for your system, either WinSW-x64.exe or WinSW-x86.exe.

1. Rename WinSW executable

• Rename the downloaded WinSW executable to frpc-winsw.exe. This will be the service wrapper for the frpc executable.

1. Create a configuration file

• Create a new XML configuration file named frpc-winsw.xml in the same directory as the frpc-winsw.exe. Add the following content to the file:

<service>
  <id>frpc</id>
  <name>frpc</name>
  <description>frp client service managed by WinSW</description>
  <executable>path\to\frpc.exe</executable>
  <arguments>-c path\to\frpc.ini</arguments>
  <log mode="roll-by-size">
    <sizeThreshold>10485760</sizeThreshold>
    <keepFiles>3</keepFiles>
  </log>
  <onfailure action="restart" />
  <startmode>Automatic</startmode>
</service>

• Replace path\to\frpc.exe with the actual path to your frpc.exe file.
• Replace path\to\frpc.ini with the actual path to your frpc.ini configuration file.

1. Install the service

• Open a command prompt or PowerShell window with administrator privileges. Navigate to the directory containing frpc-winsw.exe and frpc-winsw.xml.
• Run the following command to install the service:

.\frpc-winsw.exe install

In­stalling ser­vice 'frpc (frpc)'...
Ser­vice 'frpc (frpc)' was in­stalled suc­cess­fully.

1. Start the service

• After installing the service, start it by running the following command:

.\frpc-winsw.exe start

Ser­vice 'frpc (frpc)' was re­freshed suc­cess­fully.

Start­ing ser­vice 'frpc (frpc)'...
Ser­vice 'frpc (frpc)' started suc­cess­fully.

Also, we can restart a Win­dows ser­vice from the com­mand line (al­ter­na­tive)

net stop frpc

The frpc ser­vice is stop­ping.
The frpc ser­vice was stopped suc­cess­fully.

net start frpc

The frpc ser­vice is start­ing.
The frpc ser­vice was started suc­cess­fully.

Conclusion:

frpc is set up as a Win­dows ser­vice and will au­to­mat­i­cally start on sys­tem boot. You can man­age the ser­vice us­ing the Services man­age­ment con­sole or by us­ing the frpc-winsw.exe com­mands, such as stop, restart, and uninstall.

Reference:

• WinSW documentation
• frp documentation.