This article provides instructions on how to set up MIX as a service on Windows. As a service you can use the Windows Service manager panel to stop and start MIX, and to set it to run automatically when Windows starts. It is distributed with a permissive MIT license.

These instructions use the service wrapper (WinSW) from https://github.com/winsw. This is an active open-source project and is very easy to set up and use. There are more features available for this wrapper than the basic setup described in this article, but the basic setup should be useful for most MIX installations.

Read more about the wrapper at the bottom part of the page at https://github.com/winsw/winsw.

The first step to setting up the wrapper for MIX is to download the main executable and a configuration from https://github.com/winsw/winsw/releases.

WinSW can be set up on x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) and the executable you select to download will depend on the MIX deployment Windows version and architecture. The most straightforward setup is for Windows 10+ which has .net 4.61+ installed (it will be by default on Windows 10+ systems). Download the current release (not the beta release). As of the date of this article the current release is 2.11, and version 3 is in alpha phase and probably should not be used except for experimentation. The links below are for version 2.11 and you should check if there is a later version.

The executable to download for Windows 10 (and systems using .net 4.61 or newer) is https://github.com/winsw/winsw/releases/download/v2.11.0/WinSW.NET461.exe. If you are running an X86 version of Windows or an older version, please read the documentation page (link in the first section above) to understand which exe you will need.

Also download the simple configuration example (sample-minimal.xml) from https://github.com/winsw/winsw/releases/download/v2.11.0/sample-minimal.xml. You can also download the more extensive (examples of every configurable property) configuration (sample-allOptions.xml) from https://github.com/winsw/winsw/releases/download/v2.11.0/sample-allOptions.xml.

Make sure you have set up the MIX runtime distribution using the instructions on this wiki page Making a Runtime Installation (https://www.ergotech.com/wiki/doku.php?id=runtimesetup#making_a_mix_runtime_installation). Copy the executable and the simple (minimal) configuration file into the MIXRuntime (mixruntime) directory.