Running Soft Serve as a Systemd Service

Most Linux OSes use Systemd as an init system and service management. You can use Systemd to manage Soft Serve as a service on your host machine.

Our Soft Serve deb/rpm packages come with Systemd service files pre-packaged. You can install soft-serve from our Apt/Yum repositories. Follow the installation instructions for more information.

Writing a Systemd Service File

Note you can skip this section if you are using our deb/rpm packages or installed Soft Serve from our Apt/Yum repositories.

Start by writing a Systemd service file to define how your Soft Serve server should start.

First, we need to specify where the data should live for our server. Here I will be choosing /var/local/lib/soft-serve to store the server's data. Soft Serve will look for this path in the SOFT_SERVE_DATA_PATH environment variable.

Make sure this directory exists before proceeding.

sudo mkdir -p /var/local/lib/soft-serve

We will also create a /etc/soft-serve.conf file for any extra server settings that we want to override.

# Config defined here will override the config in /var/local/lib/soft-serve/config.yaml
# Keys defined in `SOFT_SERVE_INITIAL_ADMIN_KEYS` will be merged with
# the `initial_admin_keys` from /var/local/lib/soft-serve/config.yaml.
#
#SOFT_SERVE_GIT_LISTEN_ADDR=:9418
#SOFT_SERVE_HTTP_LISTEN_ADDR=:23232
#SOFT_SERVE_SSH_LISTEN_ADDR=:23231
#SOFT_SERVE_SSH_KEY_PATH=ssh/soft_serve_host_ed25519
#SOFT_SERVE_INITIAL_ADMIN_KEYS='ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1...'

Note Soft Serve stores its server configuration and settings in config.yaml under its data path directory specified using SOFT_SERVE_DATA_PATH environment variable.

Now, let's write a new /etc/systemd/system/soft-serve.service Systemd service file:

[Unit]
Description=Soft Serve git server 🍦
Documentation=https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve
Requires=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
ExecStart=/usr/bin/soft serve
Environment=SOFT_SERVE_DATA_PATH=/var/local/lib/soft-serve
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/soft-serve.conf
WorkingDirectory=/var/local/lib/soft-serve

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Great, we now have a Systemd service file for Soft Serve. The settings defined here may vary depending on your specific setup. This assumes that you want to run Soft Serve as root. For more information on Systemd service files, refer to systemd.service

Start Soft Serve on boot

Now that we have our Soft Serve Systemd service file in-place, let's go ahead and enable and start Soft Serve to run on-boot.

# Reload systemd daemon
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
# Enable Soft Serve to start on-boot
sudo systemctl enable soft-serve.service
# Start Soft Serve now!!
sudo systemctl start soft-serve.service

You can monitor the server logs using journalctl -u soft-serve.service. Use -f to tail and follow the logs as they get written.

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