Notes: Systemd and systemctl

For clarity: there’s lots of references online that say use “upstart” to manage auto-starting applications. Don’t! Upstart was obsoleted, and as of Ubuntu 14.10 it’s no longer available.

The ideal way to start applications is with Systemd.

Status

To check the status of services, do the following:

systemctl status

This will give you a tree of all the started services.

If you see that your state is degraded, this means a service failed to start.

Do this to see the list of failed services.

systemctl --failed

Adding a service

A service in systemd is called a Unit.

Create a .service file in /etc/systemd/system/, something like unitycache.service.

[Unit]
Description=Unity Cache
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=unitycache
Group=unitycache
WorkingDirectory=/usr/lib/node_modules/unity-cache-server/
ExecStart=/usr/bin/unity-cache-server
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then start it.

sudo systmctl start unitycache.service

Reference: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd, https://www.devdungeon.com/assets/wp/creating-systemd-service-files, https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/224992/where-do-i-put-my-systemd-unit-file

Viewing Logs

You use journalctl to check on the logs output by a Unit:

# To view the log
sudo journalctl -u unitycache

# To tail the log
sudo journalctl -f -u unitycache

Which says “show me the journal from the Unit named unitycache”.