On setting up a systemd service

Written 4 days ago

Say we have a long-running program foo that needs to run on boot and restart on failure. Here’s a quick low-down on how to set it up on systems that support systemd -

  1. Create a foo.service file:
[Unit]
Description=a foo service that does baz

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/foo
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  1. Follow the script:
# Verify correctness
systemd-analyze verify foo.service

# Copy it to systemd's dir
sudo cp foo.service /etc/systemd/system/

# Reload systemd units
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

# Start immediately, and run on boot
sudo systemctl enable foo --now
  1. Done!

To ensure things are running as they should, check the service status:

systemctl status -u foo

And the logs:

journalctl -u foo

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