systemd Developer Lennart Poettering lennart@poettering.net systemctl 1 systemctl Control the systemd system and session manager systemctl OPTIONS COMMAND NAME systemctl may be used to introspect and control the state of the systemd1 system and session manager. The following options are understood: --help -h Prints a short help text and exits. --type= -t When listing units, limit display to certain unit types. If not specified units of all types will be shown. The argument should be a unit type name such as service, socket and similar. --property= -p When showing unit/job/manager information, limit display to certain properties as specified as argument. If not specified all set properties are shown. The argument should be a property name, such as MainPID. If specified more than once all properties with the specified names are shown. --all -a When listing units, show all units, regardless of their state, including inactive units. When showing unit/job/manager information, show all properties regardless whether they are set or not. --full Do not ellipsize unit names in the output of list-units and list-jobs. --fail If the requested operation conflicts with a pending unfinished job, fail the command. If this is not specified the requested operation will replace the pending job, if necessary. --quiet -q Suppress output to STDOUT in snapshot, check, enable and disable. --no-block Do not synchronously wait for the requested operation to finish. If this is not specified the job will be verified, enqueued and systemctl will wait until it is completed. By passing this argument it is only verified and enqueued. --system Talk to the systemd system manager. (Default) --session Talk to the systemd session manager of the calling user. --order --require When used in conjunction with the dot command (see below), selects which dependencies are shown in the dependency graph. If --order is passed only dependencies of type After= or Before= are shown. If --require is passed only dependencies of type Requires=, RequiresOverridable=, Requisite=, RequisiteOverridable=, Wants= and Conflicts= are shown. If neither is passed, shows dependencies of all these types. --no-wall Don't send wall message before halt, power-off, reboot. --global When used with enable and disable, operate on the global session configuŕation directory, thus enabling or disabling a unit file globally for all future sessions of all users. --no-reload When used with enable and disable, do not implicitly reload daemon configuration after executing the changes. --force When used with enable, override any existing conflicting symlinks. --defaults When used with disable, ensures that only the symlinks created by enable are removed, not all symlinks pointing to the unit file that shall be disabled. The following commands are understood: list-units List known units. start [NAME...] Start (activate) one or more units specified on the command line. stop [NAME...] Stop (deactivate) one or more units specified on the command line. reload [NAME...] Asks all units listed on the command line to reload their configuration. Note that this will reload the service-specific configuration, not the unit configuration file of systemd. If you want systemd to reload the configuration file of a unit use the daemon-reload command. In other words: for the example case of Apache, this will reload Apache's httpd.conf in the web server, not the apache.service systemd unit file. This command should not be confused with the daemon-reload or load commands. restart [NAME...] Restart one or more units specified on the command line. If the units are not running yet they will be started. try-restart [NAME...] Restart one or more units specified on the command line. If the units are not running yet the operation will fail. reload-or-restart [NAME...] reload-or-try-restart [NAME...] Reload one or more units if they support it. If not, restart them instead. Note that for compatibility with SysV and Red Hat init scripts force-reload and condrestart may be used as equivalent commands to reload-or-try-restart. isolate [NAME] Start the unit specified on the command line and its dependencies and stop all others. Note that this works only on units where AllowIsolate= is enabled. See systemd.unit5 for details. is-active [NAME...] Check whether any of the specified units is active (i.e. running). Returns an exit code 0 if at least one is active, non-zero otherwise. Unless --quiet is specified this will also print the current unit state to STDOUT. status [NAME...|PID...] Show terse runtime status information about one or more units. This function is intended to generate human-readable output. If you are looking for computer-parsable output, use show instead. If a PID is passed information about the unit the process of the PID belongs to is shown. show [NAME...|JOB...] Show properties of one or more units, jobs or the manager itself. If no argument is specified properties of the manager will be shown. If a unit name is specified properties of the unit is shown, and if a job id is specified properties of the job is shown. By default, empty properties are suppressed. Use --all to show those too. To select specific properties to show use --property=. This command is intended to be used whenever computer-parsable output is required. Use status if you are looking for formatted human-readable output. reset-maintenance [NAME...] Reset maintenance state of the specified units, or if no unit name is passed of all units. When a unit fails in some way (i.e. process exiting with non-zero error code, terminating abnormally or timing out) it will automatically enter maintenance state and its exit codes and status is recorded for introspection by the administrator until the service is restarted or reset with this command. enable [NAME...] Enable one or more unit files, as specified on the command line. This will create a number of symlinks as encoded in the [Install] sections of the unit files. After the symlinks have been created the systemd configuration is reloaded (in a way that is equivalent to daemon-reload) to ensure the changes are taken into account immediately. Note that this does not have the effect that any of the units enabled are also started at the same time. If this is desired a seperate start command must be invoked for the unit. This command will print the actions executed. This output may be suppressed by passing --quiet. Note that this operation creates only the suggested symlinks for the units. While this command is the recommended way to manipulate the unit configuration directory, the administrator is free to make additional changes manually, by placing or removing symlinks in the directory. This is particular useful to create configurations that deviate from the suggested default installation. In this case the administrator must make sure to invoke daemon-reload manually as necessary, to ensure his changes are taken into account. Enabling units should not be confused with starting (activating) units, as done by the start command. Enabling and starting units is orthogonal: units may be enabled without being started and started without being enabled. Enabling simply hooks the unit into various suggested places (for example, so that the unit is automatically started on boot or when a particular kind of hardware is plugged in). Starting actually spawns the daemon process (in case of service units), or binds the socket (in case of socket units), and so on. Depending on whether --system, --session or --global is specified this enables the unit for the system, for sessions of the calling user only or for all future session of all users. Note that in the latter case no systemd daemon configuration is reloaded. disable [NAME...] Disables one or more units. This removes all symlinks to the specified unit files from the unit configuration directory, and hence undoes the changes made by enable. Note however that this by default removes all symlinks to the unit files (i.e. including manual additions), not just those actually created by enable. If only the symlinks that are suggested by default shall be removed, pass --defaults. This implicitly reloads the systemd daemon configuration after completing the disabling of the units. Note that this command does not implicitly stop the units that is being disabled. If this is desired an additional stopcommand should be executed afterwards. This command will print the actions executed. This output may be suppressed by passing --quiet. This command honours --system, --session, --global in a similar way as enable. is-enabled [NAME...] Checks whether any of the specified unit files is enabled (as with enable). Returns an exit code of 0 if at least one is enabled, non-zero otherwise. load [NAME...] Load one or more units specified on the command line. This will simply load their configuration from disk, but not start them. To start them you need to use the start command which will implicitly load a unit that has not been loaded yet. Note that systemd garbage collects loaded units that are not active or referenced by an active unit. This means that units loaded this way will usually not stay loaded for long. Also note that this command cannot be used to reload unit configuration. Use the daemon-reload command for that. All in all, this command is of little use except for debugging. This command should not be confused with the daemon-reload or reload commands. list-jobs List jobs that are in progress. cancel [JOB...] Cancel one or more jobs specified on the command line by their numeric job IDs. If not job id is specified cancels all jobs that are pending. monitor Monitor unit/job changes. This is mostly useful for debugging purposes and prints a line each time systemd loads or unloads a unit configuration file, or a unit property changes. dump Dump server status. This will output a (usually very long) human readable manager status dump. Its format is subject to change without notice and should not be parsed by applications. dot Generate textual dependency graph description in dot format for further processing with the GraphViz dot1 tool. Use a command line like systemctl dot | dot -Tsvg > systemd.svg to generate a graphical dependency tree. Unless --order or --require is passed the generated graph will show both ordering and requirement dependencies. snapshot [NAME] Create a snapshot. If a snapshot name is specified, the new snapshot will be named after it. If none is specified an automatic snapshot name is generated. In either case, the snapshot name used is printed to STDOUT, unless --quiet is specified. A snapshot refers to a saved state of the systemd manager. It is implemented itself as unit that is generated dynamically with this command and has dependencies on all units active at the time. At a later time the user may return to this state by using the isolate command on the snapshot unit. Snapshots are only useful for saving and restoring which units are running or are stopped, they do not save/restore any other state. Snapshots are dynamic and lost on reboot. delete [NAME...] Remove a snapshot previously created with snapshot. daemon-reload Reload systemd manager configuration. This will reload all unit files and recreate the entire dependency tree. While the daemon is reloaded, all sockets systemd listens on on behalf of user configuration will stay accessible. This command should not be confused with the load or reload commands. daemon-reexec Reexecute the systemd manager. This will serialize the manager state, reexecute the process and deserialize the state again. This command is of little use except for debugging and package upgrades. Sometimes it might be helpful as a heavy-weight daemon-reload. While the daemon is reexecuted all sockets systemd listens on on behalf of user configuration will stay accessible. daemon-exit Ask the systemd manager to quit. This is only supported for session managers (i.e. in conjunction with the --session option) and will fail otherwise. show-environment Dump the systemd manager environment block. The environment block will be dumped in straight-forward form suitable for sourcing into a shell script. This environment block will be passed to all processes the manager spawns. set-environment [NAME=VALUE...] Set one or more systemd manager environment variables, as specified on the command line. unset-environment [NAME...] Unset one or more systemd manager environment variables. If only a variable name is specified it will be removed regardless of its value. If a variable and a value are specified the variable is only removed if it has the specified value. halt Shut down and halt the system. This is mostly equivalent to start halt.target but also prints a wall message to all users. poweroff Shut down and power-off the system. This is mostly equivalent to start poweroff.target but also prints a wall message to all users. reboot Shut down and reboot the system. This is mostly equivalent to start reboot.target but also prints a wall message to all users. default Enter default mode. This is mostly equivalent to start default.target. rescue Enter rescue mode. This is mostly equivalent to isolate rescue.target but also prints a wall message to all users. emergency Enter emergency mode. This is mostly equivalent to isolate emergency.target but also prints a wall message to all users. On success 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise. systemd1, systemadm1, systemd.unit5, systemd.special7, wall1