Please help in starting a user service with systemctl

General Discussion
1

Dear friends,
I am trying to start rtorrent in the cleanest way as user osmc.

This is /etc/systemd/user/rt.service:

[Unit]
Description=rTorrent
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
KillMode=none
ExecStart=/usr/bin/screen -d -m -fa -S rtorrent /usr/bin/rtorrent
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall -w -s 2 /usr/bin/rtorrent
WorkingDirectory=%h

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

but when I try to enable it I get the following error:

osmc@osmc:/etc/systemd/user$ sudo systemctl --user enable rt
Failed to get D-Bus connection: Connessione rifiutata

Any ideas on how to fix this or have a simpler/better alternative means of restarting rtorrent after every reboot by the user osmc ? FWIW if I define rt.service as a SYSTEM service it starts allright but owned by root (which I want to avoid).

For the time being as a stopgap measure I have a start|stop type script which I manually launch from osmc home but of course this will not be launched if the system goes down and then reboots.

Thank you

2

There’s no need to try to make it it a “user service”. Just specific User=osmc, Group=osmc in the service. Here’s an example from our transmission service:

1 Like
3

Thank you very much. FWIW here is the /etc/systemd/systm/rt.service file to have rtorrent started at boot time on behalf of regular user osmc (tested working):smile:

[Unit]
Description=rtorrent
After=network.target

[Service]
User=osmc
Group=osmc
Type=forking
KillMode=none
ExecStart=/usr/bin/screen -d -m -fa -S rtorrent /usr/bin/rtorrent
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall -w -s 2 /usr/bin/rtorrent
WorkingDirectory=%h

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

4

You likely wanted to run only systemctl --user enable rt (without sudo which does not make any sense here). What you probably wanted to do was:

  1. place the file into /home/osmc/.config/systemd/user/rt.service
  2. make sure WantedBy is set to default.target (multi-user.target does not do the job)
  3. enable the service and reboot
systemctl --user enable rt
sudo reboot

Note that all commands above are to be run under osmc.

5

This post is over seven years old – is there a specific reason you reopened it?

Cheers

Sam

6

Even 7 years later the question is relevant (although it’s a bit more related to systemd in general than to OSMC itself). Although I did not find a way to run user services in OSMC documented anywhere else.