Here I describe a procees of creating a simple service startup job at linux.

Sample systemd file

Here below is shown a sample service file for systemctl

[Unit]
Description=Description for application
After=network.target

[Service]
User=<user>
Group=<group>
WorkingDirectory=<path where running file is located>
Environment=<path with environment variable PATH "PATH=/location">
EnvironmentFile=<path to environment file>
ExecStart=<a command with necessary parameters to start application>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Running and activating tasks

A service file should be located under /etc/systemd/system folder. A service file can be named anyhow, but extension of the file should be ended with .service. For instance: /etc/systemd/system/testapp.service.

When file is created reload daemon:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

And start application:

sudo systemctl start testapp.service

If application has to be started automatically, do not do not forget to enable it:

sudo systemctl enable testapp.service

Running rootless containers

In order to automate starting and stopping a rootless container on podman I followed these steps:

  1. Generating systemd unit file using and update it:

[admin@podman ~]$ podman generate systemd --new --files --name registry
/home/admin/container-registry.service

After update file looks like as following:


\# container-registry2.service

\# autogenerated by Podman 4.0.2

\# Mon Jun  6 19:38:56 CEST 2022

[Unit]
Description=Podman container-registry2.service
Documentation=man:podman-generate-systemd(1)
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
RequiresMountsFor=%t/containers

[Service]
Environment=PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT=%n
Restart=on-failure
TimeoutStopSec=70
ExecStartPre=/bin/rm -f %t/%n.ctr-id
ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman start registry2
ExecStop=/usr/bin/podman stop registry2
Type=notify
NotifyAccess=all

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
  1. Installation generated unit file

For rootless container I need to store the unit file in ~/.config/systemd/user/. For the root container copy the file to /etc/systemd/system/.

cp container-registry.service ~/.config/systemd/user/registry.service

Then, for running the user services placed in $HOME/.config/systemd/user, enable service using --user parameter:

[admin@podman ~]$ systemctl --user enable registry.service

Activate controlling the systemd login for admin:

[admin@podman ~]$ loginctl enable-linger admin

That’s it.

Reference

You may also enjoy