Starting syncthing from Systemd (take 2)

[eduncan911]

@rumpelsepp

Well, Arch includes exactly these files, see here: (…snip, new user restrictions doesn’t allow me to quote the link…)

There is not need to adjust anything.

Sorry if I didn’t mention it. Yes, I installed from the community repo and that is exactly what i am using:

suco pacman -S syncthing

@rumpelsepp

You have done the exact same mistake as I mentioned here: (…snip, new user restrictions doesn’t allow me to quote the link…)

I did find that thread, and I did as you mentioned in that thread by copying the “intended user instances” to my “.config/systemd/user/” directory, as instructed.

But straight starting with:

systemctl --user start syncthing.service

Kept returning an error in journalctl -xb that showed, if I can recall the error message, the GROUP was unable to start processes. I was able to get it to run by adding Forking, but I think that was starting to go down the wrong road.

I also did attempt to follow the instructions in your Wiki for auto starting, which was had even additional “enable” step:

systemctl --user enable syncthing.service
systemctl --user start syncthing.service

Again, this causes errors with the existing script as it was supplied. It always either wanted me to fork, or remove the user.

@rumpelsepp

You are mixing up the config files. You are using the templated unit for the user instance! On Arch Linux, just delete your custom units and file:

systemctl --user enable syncthing.service systemctl --user start syncthing.service

or

systemctl enable syncthing@eric.service systemctl start syncthing@eric.service

Again, this is exactly what i did. And the last two would not work without the --user param. Well, actually they would: you just get prompted for the user’s rights and password.

But again, same errors as before.

If you like, I can revert my working installation back to the error state and produce the errors for you. As long as User=%i was specified under [Service], it would not start without Type=forking added - which actually started to cause some login issues.

Type=forking was needed due to the errors produced.

And as I mentioned in my solution post, WantedBy=default.target was needed to get it to auto-start on login.

According to Arch wiki, Systemd/User only looks for targets with default.target to start on login:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/User#How_it_works

multi-user.target is used by the root services.

Again, I am new to Systemd and I may have mis-interrupted multi-user.target. But again, changing it to default.target was the only way to get it to autostart. Otherwise, the service would be enabled but inactive (waiting to be started) on login.

@rumpelsepp

As I mentioned above, you are mixing up things. When you use the convenient files (on arch just use the shiped ones by the package), then everything is fine.

I tried. I even attempted to follow the steps in the Arch wiki page:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Syncthing

The inotify instructions suffer from the same won’t start issues as well following those same steps.