I feel like Im dancing around perhaps the most fundamental piece of my operating system everytime I run and install software. Starting services with systemctl and checking logs with journalctl is the extent of my knowledge.
Do you know of good resources or tutorials for learning how systemd works and how to use it to run software on my desktop and servers? Thanks.
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- https://systemd.io/
- https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/using_systemd_unit_files_to_customize_and_optimize_your_system/assembly_working-with-systemd-unit-files_working-with-systemd#con_introduction-to-unit-files_assembly_working-with-systemd-unit-files
- https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/
- https://tadeubento.com/2023/systemd-hidden-gems-for-a-better-linux/
Systemd does a lot of stuff I guess it is easier to just lean based on what comes up / you need. There isn’t a single path.
Next up: Learn how to create
.servicefile, you may be able to use it from the template provided.Then learn about
targetandunitFind these on Youtube
Then .timer. Then .mount. Then .automount. Then .socket.
It seems even I have many many many things to learn still
Then .device and .boot and .home and .gov and .co.uk
see systemd.unit(5), systemd.service(5), systemd.socket(5), systemd.device(5), systemd.mount(5), systemd.automount(5), systemd.swap(5), systemd.target(5), systemd.path(5), systemd.timer(5), systemd.slice(5), systemd.scope(5) systemd.link(5), systemd.netdev(5), systemd.network(5) and honorable mentions podman-systemd.unit .container, .volume, .network(…again), .kube, .image, .build and .pod
The official website has ton of documentation and external links: https://systemd.io/
- Credentials
- Desktop Environment Integration
- Portable Services Introduction
- … and more
- Arch Linux wiki
- Debian wiki
- Gentoo wiki
- Ubuntu wiki
And here some tutorials:
- https://systemd-by-example.com/ - a tutorial with interactive examples
The best crash course I received was when I needed to translate my startup scripts into systemd services. The hands-on learning was priceless.
I always recommend people learning by doing. But playing around with system tools to see and learn how it works is a bit risky. However in a virtual machine this is probably a good idea to see how things work.
The arch wiki is always a good place to check for these sorts of things, whether or not you use arch btw.
The man pages.
Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it’s captured by my system snapshots.
I’d start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you’ll find uses that you wouldn’t have thought of before.
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