How to enable services in linux

How to enable or disable services?

I read about how to enable and disable services in Ubuntu and it seems that there are different possibilities to manage them. The first method I found is update-rc.d to add new services to startup, which aims on the /etc/init.d folder and its contents. The other one I found is to edit .conf files in the /etc/init folder. What’s the recommended way to enable / disable / add services and why? Could you please give a short bulletproof step by step example on how to add a service in Ubuntu and enable and disable it?

This would be helpful for those stuck on Fedora 12 and have landed here. In case linkrot chkconfig is what you are looking for.

Auto-start programs are configured in autostart manifests or in *.service files in several locations, as well as in init.d or crontab . See: unix.stackexchange.com/a/525845/43233

9 Answers 9

There are services that can be enabled/disabled using the GUI (like the startup application) or the terminal.

For the Terminal you have several options. First, open a terminal (Type «terminal» in the dash, for example, and open it). Then:

Temporary enabling/disabling services

To stop and start services temporarily (Does not enable / disable them for future boots), you can type service SERVICE_NAME [action] . For example:

• sudo service apache2 stop : Will STOP the Apache service until Reboot or until you start it again.
• sudo service apache2 start : Will START the Apache service assuming it was stopped before.
• service apache2 status : Will tell you the STATUS of the service, if it is either enabled/running of disabled/NOT running.
• sudo service apache2 restart : Will RESTART the service. This is most commonly used when you have changed, a config file. In this case, if you changed either a PHP configuration or an Apache configuration. Restart will save you from having to stop/start with 2 command lines
• service apache2 : In this case, since you did not mention the ACTION to execute for the service, it will show you all options available for that specific service. This aspect varies depending on the service, for example, with MySQL it would only mention that it is missing a parameter. For other services like networking service it would mention the small list of all options available.

Systemd

Starting with Ubuntu 15.04, Upstart will be deprecated in favor of Systemd. With Systemd to manage the services we can do the following (through the systemctl action SERVICE pattern):

• sudo systemctl start SERVICE : Use it to start a service. Does not persist after reboot
• sudo systemctl stop SERVICE : Use it to stop a service. Does not persist after reboot
• sudo systemctl restart SERVICE : Use it to restart a service
• sudo systemctl reload SERVICE : If the service supports it, it will reload the config files related to it without interrupting any process that is using the service.
• systemctl status SERVICE : Shows the status of a service. Tells whether a service is currently running.
• sudo systemctl enable SERVICE : Turns the service on, on the next reboot or on the next start event. It persists after reboot.
• sudo systemctl disable SERVICE : Turns the service off on the next reboot or on the next stop event. It persists after reboot.
• systemctl is-enabled SERVICE : Check if a service is currently configured to start or not on the next reboot.
• systemctl is-active SERVICE : Check if a service is currently active.
• systemctl show SERVICE : Show all the information about the service.
• sudo systemctl mask SERVICE : Completely disable a service by linking it to /dev/null ; you cannot start the service manually or enable the service.
• sudo systemctl unmask SERVICE : Removes the link to /dev/null and restores the ability to enable and or manually start the service.

Upstart (Deprecated Since 15.04)

If we want to use the official Upstart way (Note that, for the moment, not all services have been converted to Upstart), we could use the following commands:

status SERVICE — This will tell us if a converted service is running or not. Note that this is deprecated in favor of start , stop , status & restart . It will also tell us if a service has not yet been converted to upstart:

A converted service would typically output the current status (Starting, Running, Stopping. ) and process ID. A non converted service would give an error about an unknown job.

Some shortcuts may only work with the service command above but not with the commands below unless they are 100% converted to upstart services:

• sudo start mysql : Start
• sudo stop mysql : Stop
• sudo restart mysql : Restart
• sudo status smbd : Status

Enabling / Disabling a service

To toggle a service from starting or stopping permanently you would need to:

echo manual | sudo tee /etc/init/SERVICE.override 

where the stanza manual will stop Upstart from automatically loading the service on next boot. Any service with the .override ending will take precedence over the original service file. You will only be able to start the service manually afterwards. If you do not want this then simply delete the .override . For example:

echo manual | sudo tee /etc/init/mysql.override 

Will put the MySQL service into manual mode. If you do not want this, afterwards you can simply do

sudo rm /etc/init/mysql.override 

and Reboot for the service to start automatically again. Of course to enable a service, the most common way is by installing it. If you install Apache, Nginx, MySQL or others, they automatically start upon finishing installation and will start every time the computer boots. Disabling, as mentioned above, will make use of the service manual .

Why Upstart is deprecated in 15.04 ? what is the right way to run scripts on start/restart in ubuntu 16.04 or later ?

Currently there are actually three different ways for software to be started as a service in Ubuntu, SysV, Upstart and systemd. A service is defined here as a program run by the system in the background, as opposed to one started and run directly by the user.

SysV

The traditional way to start services in Linux was to place a script in /etc/init.d , and then use the update-rc.d command (or in RedHat based distros, chkconfig ) to enable or disable it.

This command uses some mildly complicated logic to create symlinks in /etc/rc#.d , that control the order of starting services. If you run ls /etc/rc2.d you can see the order that services will be killed with a file name like K##xxxx and started with file names S##xxxx . The ## in S##xxxx means a «start order» for service xxxx . Conversely, the ## in K##xxxx means the kill order for service xxxx .

One major issue with SysV was that when booting the system, everything had to be done in serial, one thing after another, making system boot times really slow. Attempts were made to parallelize this, but they were haphazard and hard to take full advantage of. This was the main reason that Upstart was created.

Upstart

Upstart uses job definition files in /etc/init to define on what events a service should be started. So, while the system is booting, upstart processes various events, and then can start multiple services in parallel. This allows them to fully utilize the resources of the system, for instance, by starting a disk-bound service up while another CPU-bound service runs, or while the network is waiting for a dynamic IP address to be assigned.

You can see all of the upstart job files by running ls /etc/init/*.conf

Let me just stop here and say that if you don’t know what a service is, or what it does, DO NOT disable it!

Not all services have been converted to upstart. While working on the server team at Canonical for the past few months, I’ve worked on a number of converted job files, and the nicest part is that it allows one to get rid of all the script «magic» and just put in a few commands here and there to define exactly how to start the service, and nothing more. But for now, only a handful of traditional network services, like squid and samba, have been converted.

Is a service upstart-based?

In order to figure out if a service is upstart-based, you can run the status command:

If it’s an upstart job, it will show this:

$ status statd statd start/running, process 942 

But if it’s not, you’ll see something more like this:

$ status apache2 status: Unknown job: apache2 

In this case, apache2 has not been converted to upstart. So, to disable apache2 you just run

sudo update-rc.d apache2 disable sudo service apache2 stop 

Disable services (jobs) in upstart

Upstart job definitions do not have an update-rc.d command. To disable the job, you need to edit the job file directly to disable it. There are two ways to do this.

If you want to still be able to manually start it, then you need to comment out the start on condition. Say you want to install samba, but not have it start automatically. Here is the job file (in natty):

description "SMB/CIFS File Server" author "Steve Langasek " start on local-filesystems stop on runlevel [!2345] respawn pre-start script RUN_MODE="daemons" [ -r /etc/default/samba ] && . /etc/default/samba [ "$RUN_MODE" = inetd ] && < stop; exit 0; >install -o root -g root -m 755 -d /var/run/samba end script exec smbd -F 

To disable samba, you can just put a # in front of the » start on local-filesystems «. Note that while it won’t start back up on boot, you still need to stop it this time with

If, however, you never want samba to start, I’d suggest actually removing the package. If, however, you want it installed, but not startable, you can also do:

mv /etc/init/smbd.conf /etc/init/smbd.conf.disabled 

Disable a service using start/stop stanza (as of 11.04)

Starting with the version of upstart that will be in 11.04, there is a new keyword that disables the start on and stop on stanzas: manual . So another way to disable the service as of 11.04 is to do:

echo 'manual' | sudo tee /etc/init/mysql.override # command from root shell echo manual >> /etc/init/mysql.override 

You can create an override file to disable a service without editing the job definition at all, by just putting the manual keyword in it.

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How to Enable or Disable Services in Ubuntu Systemd

Often, there is a need to enable or disable services temporarily or permanently on our Ubuntu system. Sometimes, we may require certain services to start up automatically on boot up e.g ssh or web servers and sometimes we may need to disable services we no longer require and are hogging the CPU and RAM.

In this guide, we take a look at how we can enable and disable services on Ubuntu. To do this, we must first understand that there are 3 main init systems for Ubuntu

Each init system has a different way of starting and stopping services. We’ll take a look at each one of these.

How to enable and disable services in Systemd init

To start a service in systemd run the command as shown:

systemctl start service-name

For example, to start apache web service, run

To verify that the service is running, run

Output ● apache2.service - LSB: Apache2 web server Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/apache2; bad; vendor preset: enabled) Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d └─apache2-systemd.conf Active: active (running) since Thu 2018-03-15 17:09:05 UTC; 35s ago Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8) CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service ├─2499 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start ├─2502 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start └─2503 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start Mar 15 17:09:04 ip-172-31-41-251 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Apache2 web server. Mar 15 17:09:04 ip-172-31-41-251 apache2[2475]: * Starting Apache httpd web ser Mar 15 17:09:05 ip-172-31-41-251 apache2[2475]: * Mar 15 17:09:05 ip-172-31-41-251 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Apache2 web server.

To stop the service running service

To confirm that the service is not running, run

Output ● apache2.service - LSB: Apache2 web server Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/apache2; bad; vendor preset: enabled) Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d └─apache2-systemd.conf Active: inactive (dead) since Thu 2018-03-15 17:19:47 UTC; 12s ago Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8) Process: 2822 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/apache2 stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS Process: 2687 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/apache2 start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCE Mar 15 17:10:11 ip-172-31-41-251 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Apache2 web server. Mar 15 17:10:11 ip-172-31-41-251 apache2[2687]: * Starting Apache httpd web ser Mar 15 17:10:12 ip-172-31-41-251 apache2[2687]: * Mar 15 17:10:12 ip-172-31-41-251 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Apache2 web server. Mar 15 17:19:46 ip-172-31-41-251 systemd[1]: Stopping LSB: Apache2 web server. Mar 15 17:19:46 ip-172-31-41-251 apache2[2822]: * Stopping Apache httpd web ser Mar 15 17:19:47 ip-172-31-41-251 apache2[2822]: * Mar 15 17:19:47 ip-172-31-41-251 systemd[1]: Stopped LSB: Apache2 web server.

To enable apache2 service on boot up run

To disable apache2 service on boot up run

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