Command-Line Systemd Pager – How to Exit the systemctl Status Command’s Output

This happens because a unit in systemd is encapsulated from rest of the system. Have you tried setting it directly in the unit file like this?

Environment="FOO=foo" 'BAR=bar'

The variables FOO and BAR are then available in your unit. For example if this is my ExecuteStart:

ExecStart=/bin/echo $FOO ${FOO} ${BAR}

With the Environment option from above this would result in the following output:

foo foo bar

An alternative would be doing it via a environment config file. For this you can read the fedora dokumentation:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Systemd#EnvironmentFiles_and_support_for_.2Fetc.2Fsysconfig_files

This link contains some useful examples with docker:

https://coreos.com/os/docs/latest/using-environment-variables-in-systemd-units.html

So it turned out that the command that is executed with the ExecStart configuration did not fork whereas the systemd service was configured for a forking executable. This lead systemctl to wait for the for of the executable leading to a not returning command line.

The correct configuration for an executable that does not fork is to use Type=simple.

[Unit]
Description=djalbat.com

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/djalbat.com/
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node ./bin/main.js start 2>&1 >> /var/log/djalbat.com.log

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The WantedBy is needed to connect this unit with a target, so this unit or service is started automatically when the appropriate target is reached and the service is enabled to start automatically with

systemctl enable djalbat

Don't forget to refresh systemd after you have made changes to your service files with

systemctl daemon-reload