Example of a systemd service file

Here is an almost-minimal example of a systemd service file, that I use to run the Mastodon bot of my generative art playground Graft.

I made a dedicated user just to run this service, and installed Graft into /home/graft/apps/graft under that username. Now, as root, I edited a file called /etc/systemd/system/graft.service and made it look like this:

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/graft/apps/graft/bot-mastodon
User=graft
Group=graft
WorkingDirectory=/home/graft/apps/graft/
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now I can start the graft service like any other service like this:

sudo systemctl start graft

and find out its status with:

sudo systemctl status graft

If I want it to run on startup I can do:

sudo systemctl enable graft

and it will. Easy!

If I want to look at its output, it's:

sudo journalctl -u graft

As a reward for reading this far, here's a little animation you can make with Graft:

If you want the service to be restarted whenever it fails, under [Service] add something like this:

Restart=always
RestartSec=3

More info at: Jon Archer's blog post.