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 through host
switcher 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