Linux – How to run service not as root

linuxprivilegesservicessystemd

I created successfully a service on my Linux RedHat by copy the Unit-File to /usr/lib/systemd/system/mediation.service

I can successfully start/stop/enable/… the service with

systemctl enable mediation
systemctl start mediation
etc.

However, since systemctl is usually executed by root, my application runs also as root. How can I configure the service that it runs under a different (non-privileged) user?

Best Answer

Use:

User=myuser

In your unit file.

This is documented in man systemd.exec

Also, custom files should not go in /usr/lib/systemd/system, they should go in /etc/systemd/system. The former is where packages install their files. The later is where system administrators should put their files.

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Linux – How to run bash script as root on startup

The journal is actually telling you why your service won't start.

What it's saying is that service units are not shell scripts. You don't get, apart from some very specialized items, things like ~ expansions or environment variables in service units. The name that you pass to ExecStart must be the ordinary, absolute, path of the program to run. Your name is ~/system/cap.sh, which is (of course) a relative path not an absolute one. This is not the shell. ~ is not a metacharacter. It's an ordinary character, denoting some purported subdirectory of the current directory named ~.

systemd refuses to accept an ExecStart with a relative pathname. And it refuses, obviously enough, to start a service that doesn't have a valid ExecStart that describes how the service is started.

After fixing that, you then need to fix your script so that it's actually a properly executable script. It needs to have execute permission and to have #! spelled properly on the first line. Also note that there's nothing about it that requires the Bourne Again shell, and it's a good idea to follow Debian's lead of using the Almquist rather than the Bourne Again shell in scripts run as part of the system bootstrap.

You'll probably want to tweak your service file so that it doesn't fiddle with the network interfaces in parallel with the system initializing them in the first place. What that means is specific to your system, so you'll have to work out what to put as an After= in your unit file.

Linux – Systemd service start error

I'm assuming you have checked nothing else is using port 80 (which I assume lighttpd is configured to use). Check that bonescript still doesn't have the port bound, stop it with:

systemctl stop bonescript.service
systemctl stop bonescript.socket

Best Answer

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