[systemd-devel] using systemd for user-specific services

[Kay Sievers]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 12:43, Tim Cuthbertson <tim at gfxmonk.net> wrote:
> I've seen systemd described as a system & session manager, I was
> wondering how far the session manager aspect could be taken. Is it
> possible to have services run on a per-user basis, that don't require
> root access to configure or run?
>
> I'd like to use systemd's features to provide services for the
> duration of my own login, but don't want to have to configure them
> system-wide (sometimes for purity of my non-home partition which I
> replace from time to time, sometimes because it is a machine that I
> may not even have root access to).
>
> If you would like an example, something I currently run (in a very
> hacky way) on login is edit-server
> http://gfxmonk.net/dist/0install/edit-server.xml
> This is a simple local HTTP server that runs on port 9292
> (configurable), and there's no need to make it available system-wide.
>
> If it's not possible now, do you think there is much chance of it
> being considered in the future?

We are working on it, and are almost there already. There will be a
systemd instance started for every user, that is logged in (or if
configured even for users who are allowed to run stuff in the
background).

There are a few patches to D-Bus and related stuff missing, but all
should start working out-of-the-box during the next couple of weeks.

You could already try to start systemd --user, it should work somehow,
but it's probably not that useful or interesting, and stuff might
change if needed, when do the out-of-the-box integration.

Kay