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Accepted
George Y
Asked: 2023-09-13 18:00:24 +0800 CST

How can I find the exact cause of systemd service unable to start (service has a bad unit file setting)?

  • 772

This is really annoying that systemd only responded that my configuration of a service file is wrong, but does not specify where is wrong exactly:

/lib/systemd/system/auto_pgha.service:

[Unit]
Description=PostgreSQL High Availability
After=network.service
After=firewalld.service


[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/etc/repmgr
ExecStartPre=/bin/bash -c 'echo -e "\n"  `date +"%Y/%m/%d %a, %X"`": STARTING \n"  >> pgha.log'
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "python3 pg_high_availability.py  &>> pgha.log"
Restart=always
RestartSec=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Inside directory /etc/repmgr the two commands worked just fine. But the systemd service just responded with an error:

# systemctl start auto_pgha
Failed to start auto_pgha.service: Unit auto_pgha.service has a bad unit file setting.
See system logs and 'systemctl status auto_pgha.service' for details.

# systemctl status -l auto_pgha
○ auto_pgha.service - PostgreSQL High Availability
     Loaded: bad-setting (Reason: Unit auto_pgha.service has a bad unit file setting.)
......
auto_pgha.service: Unit configuration has fatal error, unit will not be be started.
systemd

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use the systemd-analyze verify command. If we put the content from your question into pgha.service, we see:

    $ systemd-analyze verify pgha.service
.../pgha.service:10: Failed to resolve unit specifiers in echo -e "
"  `date +"%Y/%m/%d %a, %X"`": STARTING
"  >> pgha.log: Invalid slot
pgha.service: Unit configuration has fatal error, unit will not be started.
Unit pgha.service has a bad unit file setting.

    You're getting this error because systemd itself uses %<something> tokens (see the "Specifiers" section of the systemd.unit(5) man page.

    You would need to write:

    ExecStartPre=/bin/bash -c 'echo -e "\n"  `date +"%%Y/%%m/%%d %%a, %%X"`": STARTING \n"  >> pgha.log'
    • 2