[systemd-devel] how to call dbus ListUnits for user units?

[Chris Morgan]

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Mantas Mikulėnas <grawity at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Chris Morgan <chmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> But I can't seem to figure out how to do the same for user units.
>> There doesn't seem to be an org.freedesktop.systemd1 interface on my
>> current user's session bus and I wasn't able to spot anything in the
>> interfaces on the system bus that had a nested interface of
>> org.freedesktop.system1.Manager...
>
>
> The first "org.freedesktop.systemd1" here is a /service/ name; the usual
> hierarchy is bus - service - object - interface - method, no such thing as
> nested interfaces.
>
> Anyway. The user processes are not allowed to own service names on the
> system bus. And `systemd --user` is a per-user service, not a per-session
> one, so it cannot be on the session bus for various reasons: it doesn't know
> the bus address; it needs to outlive the session bus; the user might
> sometimes have multiple sessions with their own 'session bus' instances.
>
> So the idea is that `systemd --user` would be found on the /user/ bus, which
> would someday replace the 'session' bus entirely.
>
> But right now, the 'user' bus does not exist by default. To create it, you
> need either
> a) enable/install/boot with kdbus,
> or b) obtain the "dbus.service" & "dbus.socket" user units. (They're in
> dbus-git, or various other places like
> <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/User#D-Bus>.)
>
> Configured this way, the 'user' bus won't replace the session bus yet, but
> you *will* be able to connect to it and reach systemd, at address
> "kernel:path=/dev/kdbus/$UID-user/bus;unix:path=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/bus".
>
> --
> Mantas Mikulėnas <grawity at gmail.com>

Hmm. I guess user services aren't used as much as system ones are?

Is there another way to interface with systemctl like functionality
programmatically? I have a c application that today is shelling out to
systemctl to start services (which is fine for me since I'm not that
concerned if it fails but it would be nice to know right at that
time), but once everything is started I'd like to go through the
services to make sure they all got started successfully. I didn't want
to shell out to 'systemctl --user status xxx' and parse the output....

Chris