Systemd shutting down when terminal is closed

Question

My systemd service file is in the name of os.service and has the following line of configuration.

#  This systemd service file will help supervise os service
[Unit]
Description=Os Server
After= network.target

[Service]

# Preferably configure a non-privileged user
# User=deploy
# Group=deploy

# Environment variables shared across the config
#EnvironmentFile=  # environment file to be used, includes RACK_ENV
EnvironmentFile=/home/deploy/test/shared/.env
SyslogIdentifier=test
PIDFile=/home/deploy/test/shared/tmp/server.pid

# Specify the path to your test application root
# WorkingDirectory=/home/deploy/test/

# Start/Reload/Stop syntax
ExecStart=/home/deploy/test/current

# TimeoutSec=15
# TimeoutStopSec=10
RestartSec=5s           

# Restart os, always if it dies for some reason
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

In server when I disconnect my ssh connection then service dies and results in 502 Bad Gateway. I have to ssh and run systemctl --user start os.service to start and make it work. Again once i close my terminal then os.service dies again.

Answer 1

You’re running the service from your user manager (--user), and apparently your logind doesn’t have lingering enabled for you. As a result, your session (including any services started inside it) is closed down whenever you log out.

To change this behaviour, you need to enable lingering:

sudo loginctl enable-linger $USER

This will start a user manager for you at boot and allow your services to survive your login sessions.

A better approach for a system service such as this is really to run it as its own user, managed by the main systemd instance.