systemd Services

Part of the Linux course

You wrote a script that works. You run it, it does its job, and then you close your terminal and it dies with the session. You want it to start when the machine boots, come back if it crashes, and write its output somewhere you can read later. Doing that by hand is a surprising amount of work.

When a Linux machine boots, something has to bring up the network, mount the disks, start the SSH server, and do it all in the right order without waiting needlessly. That something is systemd, the first process the kernel starts and the parent of nearly everything else. ...