this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Systemd: Hidden Gems for a Better Linux // Self-host more with less hardware (tadeubento.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by TCB13@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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After a few conversations with people on Lemmy and other places it became clear to me that most aren't aware of what it can do and how much more robust it is compared to the usual "jankiness" we're used to.

In this article I highlight less known features and give out a few practice examples on how to leverage Systemd to remove tons of redundant packages and processes.

And yes, Systemd does containers. :)

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[–] maor@lemmy.org.il 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Love me some systemd timers. Much more fun than cron.

  • Sane handling of environment variables with EnvironmentFile=
  • Out of the box logging. Especially useful is the ability to journalctl -f to watch long-running processes, which I'm not sure whether possible with cron
  • The ability to trigger the service manually rather than setting the timer to * * * * *, then forgetting it's supposed to run in a minute, get distracted, come back in 15 minutes

My only complaint is it's a bit verbose. I'd rather have it as an option inside the .service file. The .timer requires some boilerplate like [Unit].description (it... uh... triggers a service. that's the description), and WantedBy=timers.target. But these are small prices to pay

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Another thing I particularly like is systemctl list-timers --all and its overview of the timer statuses and when they're going to run next.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My only complaint is it's a bit verbose. I'd rather have it as an option inside the .service file. The .timer requires some boilerplate like [Unit].description (it... uh... triggers a service. that's the description), and WantedBy=timers.target.

This can be solved through abstraction and automation.

In NixOS for example, you can declare a service that runs an arbitrary script every day like this:

{
  systemd.services.your-service-here = {
    script = "echo 'Hello, world!'";
    startAt = "daily";
  };
}

This automatically creates a service file with the script in its ExecStart and an accompanying timer which runs daily and is part of the timers.target.

[–] maor@lemmy.org.il 2 points 1 year ago

Yep, I manage my servers and local machine with Ansible so I abstracted it with a role. This is indeed not that bad of a con because it's still plaintext so automation is easy, but it's still a minor issue ;)