Creating a new service

To create a brand new service from scratch, use the --force and --full options together, like this:

donnie@ubuntu20-04:~$ sudo systemctl edit --force --full timestamp.service

This will create a new service file in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory, just as we saw previously.

For this demo, we'll create a service that will place a periodic timestamp into our system log file. Our timestamp.service file will look like this:

[Unit]
Description=Service Creation Demo
Wants=network.target
After=syslog.target network-online.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/timestamp.sh
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=20
KillMode=process
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Here, we see the RestartSec= parameter, which we haven't seen before. This works with the Restart= line and just says to wait for the designated number of seconds before restarting a crashed service. Here, we're saying to wait for 20 seconds. We don't see a Type= line here...