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init/docs/services.md
David Oberhollenzer cd946f0b9c Add basic documentation stub
Signed-off-by: David Oberhollenzer <david.oberhollenzer@tele2.at>
2018-04-14 21:39:40 +02:00

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# Service Files
Services that can be started and managed by init are described by service
description files stored in `/usr/share/init`.
The init process actually reads from `/etc/init.d` which contains symlinks to
the actual service files.
Enabling a service means adding a symlink, disabling means removing a symlink.
Service descriptions can be parameterized. The arguments are extracted from the
name of the symlink. Currently only 1 parameter is supported. The argument
value is separated from the service name by an '@' character in the symlink
name.
Below is an annotated example for a simple, service description for a
generic, parameterized agetty service:
#
# The text that init should print out when the status of the
# service changes.
#
# The '%0' is replaced with the first argument extracted from the
# symlink name.
#
description "agetty on %0"
#
# How to run the service. 'respawn' means restart the service when it
# terminates, 'once' means run it only once and continue with other
# services in the mean while, 'wait' means run it once, but block until
# it exits.
#
type respawn
#
# When to start the service. 'boot' means when booting the system. Other
# options are 'reboot', 'shutdown' and 'ctrlaltdel'. The system always
# starts into the 'boot' target and then later transitions to one of the
# others.
#
target boot
#
# A list of service names that must be started before this service can
# be run, i.e. this services needs to be started after those.
#
# This can only refer to generic names, not specific instances. For
# instance, you can say "after getty" to make sure a service comes up after
# all gettys are started, but you cannot specify "after agetty@tty1".
#
# Similar to 'after', there is also a 'before' keyword for specifying
# dependencies.
#
after sysinit
#
# The 'tty' directive specifies a file to which all I/O of the process is
# redirected. The specified device file is used as a controlling tty for
# the process and a new session is created with the service process as
# session leader.
#
# In this example, we derive the controlling tty from the service
# description argument.
#
tty "/dev/%0"
#
# The 'exec' directive specifies the command to execute in order to start
# the service. See in the example below on how to run multiple commands.
#
# Again we use the argument to specify what terminal our getty
# should run on.
#
exec agetty %0 linux
As can be seen in this simple example, each line in a service description is
made up of a keyword, followed by one or more arguments and terminated by a
line break.
Blank lines are ignored and shell-style comments can be used.
Arguments are separated by space. Quotation marks can be used to treat
something containing spaces or comment character as a single argument.
In between quotation marks, C-style escape sequences can be used.
Argument substitution (arguments derived from the symlink name) can be
done using a '%' sign, followed by the argument index. A '%' sign can be
escaped by writing '%%'.
If a service should sequentially run multiple commands, they can be grouped
inside braces as can be seen in the following, abbreviated example:
description "mount /var"
type wait
target boot
before vfs
exec {
mount -t tmpfs none /var
mkdir /var/log -m 0755
mkdir /var/spool -m 0755
mkdir /var/lib -m 0755
mkdir /var/tmp -m 0755
mount --bind /cfg/preserve/var_lib /var/lib
}