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I have created a --user service in systemd such that a non privileged user can manage a service. This works well. I wanted to restart the service at a fixed given time of day, so i created a cron job in the users crontab.

Strangely this does not work. The user can restart the service if they run:

systemctl --user restart myservice.service

However running this from the crontab does not restart the service. Does anyone know why?

This is running on Ubuntu 16.04.

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  • Please paste output of command crontab -l. You have to execute it as user which have permissions to this service. The other question is: why do you want to restart it using cron?
    – mrc02_kr
    Oct 10, 2018 at 8:34

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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systemctl --user needs to talk to the D-Bus session, which involves setting at least DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and perhaps XDG_RUNTIME_DIR; typically:

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u)
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/bus
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
systemctl --user restart myservice.service

You might want to look at systemd timers instead of cron for this.

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  • This worked. Thanks. Is there a reason why cron should not be used in this case?
    – Magnus Jørgensen
    Oct 10, 2018 at 8:58
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    No particular reason, I only suggested timers because they should deal with all this transparently (but I haven’t used timers for user services so I don’t know how to do it and whether it would work).
    – Stephen Kitt
    Oct 10, 2018 at 9:00
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    There is a reason with respect to the larger point made in a question comment. Often in my experience this sort of scheduled externally forced restart is a bodge, that papers over an underlying problem.
    – JdeBP
    Oct 10, 2018 at 11:11
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    systemd user services only run while there is a user session, whereas the cronjob would probably still run if there’s no user session. (That’s why the cronjob doesn’t know about the dbus session: cron exists outside of the session.) I agree that a systemd timer is the better solution here.
    – Lucas Werkmeister
    Oct 11, 2018 at 12:50
  • Starting/stopping a service with a timer does not work though, since as soon as the timer triggers all you get is an infinite restart loop of said service.
    – Philipp Ludwig
    Jul 2, 2022 at 7:09
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Same issue.

Adding ; XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/bus export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

In Lubuntu 22.04 fixed the issue

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