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Service Command

The service command is a wrapper script that allows system administrators to start, stop, and check the status of services without worrying too much about the actual init system being used. Prior to systemd's introduction, it was a wrapper for /etc/init.d scripts and Upstart's initctl command, and now it is a wrapper for these two and systemctl as well.

It checks for Upstart:

# Operate against system upstart, not session
unset UPSTART_SESSION
if [ -r "/etc/init/${SERVICE}.conf" ] && which initctl >/dev/null \
   && initctl version 2>/dev/null | grep -q upstart \
   && initctl status ${SERVICE} 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
then
   # Upstart configuration exists for this job and we're running on upstart

If that doesn't work, it looks for systemd:

if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
   is_systemd=1
fi

...

# When this machine is running systemd, standard service calls are turned into
# systemctl calls.
if [ -n "$is_systemd" ]
then

And if that fails as well, it falls back to System V /etc/init.d scripts:

run_via_sysvinit() {
   # Otherwise, use the traditional sysvinit
   if [ -x "${SERVICEDIR}/${SERVICE}" ]; then
      exec env -i LANG="$LANG" LANGUAGE="$LANGUAGE" LC_CTYPE="$LC_CTYPE" LC_NUMERIC="$LC_NUMERIC" LC_TIME="$LC_TIME" LC_COLLATE="$LC_COLLATE" LC_MONETARY="$LC_MONETARY" LC_MESSAGES="$LC_MESSAGES" LC_PAPER="$LC_PAPER" LC_NAME="$LC_NAME" LC_ADDRESS="$LC_ADDRESS" LC_TELEPHONE="$LC_TELEPHONE" LC_MEASUREMENT="$LC_MEASUREMENT" LC_IDENTIFICATION="$LC_IDENTIFICATION" LC_ALL="$LC_ALL" PATH="$PATH" TERM="$TERM" "$SERVICEDIR/$SERVICE" ${ACTION} ${OPTIONS}
   else
      echo "${SERVICE}: unrecognized service" >&2
      exit 1
   fi
}

...
run_via_sysvinit

Since the service command is a fairly simple wrapper, it only supports a limited subset of actions compared to what the actual init system might provide.

For portability over various versions of Ubuntu, users can reliably use the service command to start, stop, restart or examine the status of a service. For more complex tasks, however, the actual command being used, be that initctl or systemctl or the /etc/init.d script might have to be used directly.

Further, being a wrapper, the service script in some cases also does more than the direct equivalent command might do. For example:

  • It always executes /etc/init.d scripts in a clean environment. (Note the long env command invocation in the run_via_sysvinit function above.)
  • It maps restart on Upstart systems to a combination of stop/start, since a plain initctl restart will error out if the service isn't running already.
  • It stops sockets when stopping systemd services which have associated sockets:
case "${ACTION}" in
  restart|status)
     exec systemctl $sctl_args ${ACTION} ${UNIT}
  ;;
  start|stop)
     # Follow the principle of least surprise for SysV people:
     # When running "service foo stop" and foo happens to be a service that
     # has one or more .socket files, we also stop the .socket units.
     # Users who need more control will use systemctl directly.

Upstart services were enabled directly in the service configuration file (or disabled via overrides), and System V scripts were enabled or disabled with the update-rc.d command (which managed symlinks in the /etc/rc* directories), so the service command was never involved in enabling or disabling services on boot.

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