[systemd-devel] systemd --user fails to start a user service at the first time

[Han]

Hi,

I'm a newbie to systemd. I encountered a strange problem when using
systemd user
service in Debian 10 (hardware: Raspberry Pi 4), systemd version 241.

I posted this question on stackoverflow but didn't get answers yet. Hence
trying to ask here. My apologies if this is too basic.

   1. I created a new service unit file at here:
   /home/pi/.config/systemd/user/foo.service

its content looks like this:

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/pi/test/foo
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/test


   1. I tried to start this service, but it failed:

$ systemctl --user start foo
Failed to start foo.service: Unit foo.service not found.

However, systemd can list this unit file when doing this:

$systemctl --user list-unit-files --type service | grep foo
foo.service                      static

Moreover, when I added [Install] section in the unit file:

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and run $systemctl --user enable foo , it worked.

Even more, after that I removed the unit file, and recreated the unit file
without the [Install] section, now I start the service and the original
problem is no longer seen.

So it seems like only when I try to create a new user service for the first
time on the system, without using [Install], it will fail to start.

Any ideas why this is happening? (btw, I don't want to have [Install] for
this service.)

Or is this a known issue fixed in a later release?

Thanks

Han
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