[Discussion] Adding a systemd .service file?

[Honeypot95]

Would there be interest in adding a systemd service file? I was unsure about a convenient way of running the service automatically at startup, without intervetion, so I wrote a personal service file for systemd.

I can contribute it, but it probably needs much more work.

Am I missing something on the way to run the sync server?

[VikashKothary]

Hi @Honeypot95, I'm sure that would be useful for our users.

What do you think would be the best way to share this? Possibility you could add it and some explanation on how to use in our docs?

Let me know what you think?

[Honeypot95]

I have a .service file roughly as such:

[Unit]
Description=Anki sync server

[Service]
Type=simple
User=$USER
ExecStart=$HOME/anaconda3/bin/python3 -m ankisyncd
WorkingDirectory=$HOME/git/anki-sync-server/src/

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Unfortunately, environment variables such as $HOME do not work in such files.

The best solution I think is to have this template, and ship a script that installs this file into /etc/systemd/system/, and that also expands the paths to absolute values. So the WorkingDirectory will be the directory where the ankisyncd lies.

An additional problem that I foresee is that we also have to this for the python executable. Because many people, such as myself, use different python executables than the system ones, when systemd will try to run the file, it will run it with the system python, which may not have every requirement installed.

The docs should have another step, marked optional, for running the script with sudo to install the systemd service. Additionally, maybe there is a need for a complete installation script? Something akin to make install and have everything solved, with the config file set to default values.

I will make a pull request with this idea, so we can discuss actual code.