[systemd-devel] dbus activation service path

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 at 23:27:20 +0200, Damian Ivanov wrote:
> I also have a question about dbus activation.
> Is there an environment variable or something to tell systemd/dbus-broker &co
> to look in a specific path for dbus .service files?

The D-Bus Specification[1] says:

     On Unix systems, the session bus should search for .service files in
     $XDG_DATA_DIRS/dbus-1/services as defined by the XDG Base Directory
     Specification. Implementations may also search additional locations,
     with a higher or lower priority than the XDG directories.

so you should set the environment variables XDG_DATA_HOME and/or
XDG_DATA_DIRS, the same way you set those variables to influence the
search path for .desktop files. See [2] for more information.

If a piece of software that reads session service definition files does
not do this, please report that as a bug in that piece of software, using
its bug tracking system. In particular, if you believe dbus-broker has
a bug in this area, reporting it in flatpak's bug tracker is unlikely
to get it seen or fixed by dbus-broker developers.

    smcv

[1] https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html
[2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html