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Creating Your Own Service File with Network Requirements in CentOS

At some point in your career as a system administrator, you'll be given a piece of software that doesn't have its own service file. If that ever happens, the skills gained here will let you write up a service file so `systemd` can manage the service with no issues.

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Lab Info
Level
Intermediate
Last updated
Aug 17, 2025
Duration
30m

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Table of Contents
  1. Challenge

    Identify the Target to Use to Determine if the Network Is Online

    In /usr/lib/systemd/system, there are a number of targets you might be able to use.

    Among them, network-online.target seems like the best bet.

    If you look at man 7 systemd.special there's an entry about the network-online.target as well, and that looks like the right thing.

  2. Challenge

    Write the Custom Service File

    First, navigate to /etc/systemd/system to place our custom service file.

    There, open custom.service and fill it out so it looks like this:

    [Unit]
    Description=Custom Service
    Wants=network-online.target
    After=network-online.target
    
    [Service]
    Type=forking
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
    ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(kill-emacs)"
    
    [Install]
    WantedBy=default.target
    

    Once complete, test it with:

    systemctl start custom.service
    

    Once it's running, leave it that way and you've completed the task.

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