Stalwart will not start after attempting to add license

[jamiedumont]

Morning all,

I successfully set up Stalwart yesterday and had it sending and receiving mail correctly. I requested a trial of an enterprise license, and since adding the license to config.toml I haven't been able to get the Stalwart service to start.

I removed the license and restored config.toml from a backup I made prior to the change and that didn't resolve the problem. The logs show nothing, only:

Oct 24 10:23:40 stalwart systemd[1]: Started stalwart.service - Stalwart.
Oct 24 10:23:40 stalwart systemd[1]: stalwart.service: Deactivated successfully.

Only when I reboot the server do I see something different:

-- Boot 947f045ee04f49748c5e2eed63733c2b --
Oct 24 09:58:07 stalwart systemd[1]: Started stalwart.service - Stalwart.
Oct 24 09:58:07 stalwart stalwart[809]: 2025-10-24T09:58:07Z INFO Starting Stalwart Server v0.14.0 (server.startup) version = "0.14.0"
Oct 24 09:58:07 stalwart stalwart[809]: 2025-10-24T09:58:07Z ERROR Server startup error (server.startup-error) details = "Failed to migrate database, aborting startup.", reason = Store not configured (store.not-configured) { causedBy = "crates/store/src/dispatch/store.rs:65", causedBy = "crates/migration/src/lib.rs:104" }
Oct 24 09:58:07 stalwart systemd[1]: stalwart.service: Deactivated successfully.

But this only occurs after a reboot. I'm using a minimal config, using Rocks for everything. I've gone through my config.toml and verified that there's no typos.

I suspect that it was restarting Stalwart after the config change (for the license) that was the issue, rather than the config change itself. I've effectively ruled that out by reverting. I read somewhere that Stalwart reads the config from the TOML file and then persists it in the storage. I think that may be the issue here, as it's the first time I've used systemctl to restart since running the install.sh yesterday (using the WebAdmin restart thus far instead).

Any ideas? I'm feeling that the issue is with the Rocks storage in /opt/stalwart/data and a simple solution may be to wipe that and start from a clean slate, but it speaks to a further problem with my install if that's required!

[jamiedumont]

Worked out the issue through a series of increasingly risky debugging steps!

First I removed the data from /opt/stalwart/data to see if it was a corruption issue. That didn't fix it, so I returned it.
Then I ran sh install.sh again; which did fix it!

I added back the few bits of config that had got wiped (but all data remained) and started to work out what caused it.

Adding the license through the UI was fine. Restarting the systemd service in the command line was fine.

Then I checked the file permissions on config.toml before and after I directly edited it. That was it! The way I was editing it was changing the owner to root. Fixed with a simple...

-rwx------ 1 root stalwart 2070 Oct 24 10:44 /opt/stalwart/etc/config.toml
sudo chown stalwart /opt/stalwart/etc/config.toml
-rwx------ 1 stalwart stalwart 2070 Oct 24 10:44 /opt/stalwart/etc/config.toml

I'll leave this here for anyone else that makes my same silly mistake!