Systemd is an integral service management suite that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. It is capable of starting and maintaining applications running on the server, such as project moore, ordsys, nginx, and others. Additionally, systemd can configure applications to launch automatically upon server boot.

To register an application with systemd, a service file must be created in /etc/systemd/system. This process is typically automated by Ansible for roles that necessitate it.

Commands #

The following commands interact with systemd services, with service_name being the filename of the service in the systemd directory (e.g., /etc/systemd/system/service_name.service):

• systemctl status *service_name* - Displays the current status of a service.
• systemctl start/stop *service_name* - Starts or stops a service.
• systemctl restart *service_name* - Restarts a service.
• systemctl enable/disable *service_name* - Enables or disables a service to start automatically during server boot.
• systemctl daemon-reload - Reloads systemd to apply any changes to service files.

Logs #

Ubuntu includes journalctl, a command used to view logs for systemd services. You can access the logs of a specific service with journalctl -u service_name.