Until recently there was a simple and effective way to start/stop/restart services:
service nginx start|stop|restart
This worked perfectly for so many years,… until the distribution switched to systemd and now I am facing with Debian/Ubuntu systems where the service script does nothing (as I am supposed to use the stuff like systemctl start nginx.service (much much longer, no auto-complete working,…)
My question refers specially to Debian and Ubuntu but it would also be helpful to cover CentOS/RedHat distros too.
In case it was not clear, I am looking for a consistent way to deal with those, one that would work on Debian 7.x, 8.x, latest Ubuntu LTS and non-LTS.
PS. Outside the scope of this specific question, but extra kudos granted if the solution would also cover the enable and disable part for the services.
Best Answer
There have been a number of varied boot and service control systems across Unix platforms over its tangled history.
The
service\chkconfigbased system you found simple and effective is generally referred to as SysVinit style and was a major step along the way to some sort of standardization. You will find this style of boot on RHEL/CentOS(EL) through the 6 release, Fedora through 14, and on Debian/Ubuntu based distributions up until 2015. It was not the only boot system around though, the (simpler) BSD style init system still has many fans.SysVinit was not a perfect solution (what is?) and Systemd was devised to overcome many of the issues; this is the
systemctlcommand based system you are now experiencing. Although it is not universally liked (people hate change, bloat, etc) there is no doubt that it is fast becoming the defacto standard across the majority of distributions.Therefore, looking immediately forward the answer to your original question is simply:
The standard way to control services across most Linux distributions is now
systemctl!How long this will hold true is anyone's guess; probably just until something comes along that is better and becomes widely adopted.
I'm sure there will be wrappers available to allow, your current favorite, the
service/chkconfigcommands to continue to do mostly sane things, but with this particular learning curve it is probably best not to fight it. Maybe looking forward, for a time there'll also besystemctlwrappers for older systems, to make managing them alongside more current ones less of a pain ;)