Posts tagged linux
Manage multiple systemd service instances
- 17 July 2023
With systemd you can manage services like in post Environment variables set by systemd, but managing multiple instances of the same service is not so easy. For example, you have a service that runs a web server, and you want to run multiple instances of that service, each with different configuration. You can do that by creating multiple service files, but that is not very elegant. You can also use systemd templating, but that is not very flexible. The best way to do this is to use systemd instances.
For the example, we will create a service that runs a Python script. The script will print the value of an environment variable. The name of the environment variable will be the name of the instance. The script will be called env_variables.py and will be located in /usr/local/bin/. The service will be called env_variables@.service and will be located in /etc/systemd/system/. So let’s copy the script from the previous post as it can print the value of an environment variable to the standard output.