Start up

Process exit
Boot start up

Cockpit's cockpit-ws component is what the browser connects to and it typically starts on demand via systemd socket activation.

The actual cockpit.service and cockpit-ws process will start on demand when a browser accesses the cockpit.socket, usually on port 9090. Once a user logs in then a cockpit-bridge process will be started in a Linux user login session.

Only systems that you connect to with your browser need to have the cockpit.socket enabled. For systems that you add to the dashboard of another Cockpit instance, the bridge is started via SSH on demand.

Process exit

The cockpit-bridge process will exit when the user logs out. In addition, after 10 minutes of inactivity, the cockpit-ws process will exit on its own. The browser will automatically disconnect if it fails to hear from the cockpit-ws process for 30 seconds.

Boot start up

To make Cockpit available by default after system boot the cockpit.socket needs to be enabled:

$ sudo systemctl enable cockpit.socket

If you wish to not have Cockpit available by default via a browser, then the cockpit.socket should be disabled:

$ sudo systemctl disable cockpit.socket