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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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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

30m

Last updated

Aug 17, 2025

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.

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.

Author

Pluralsight Skills

Pluralsight Skills gives leaders confidence they have the skills needed to execute technology strategy. Technology teams can benchmark expertise across roles, speed up release cycles and build reliable, secure products. By leveraging our expert content, skill assessments and one-of-a-kind analytics, keep up with the pace of change, put the right people on the right projects and boost productivity. It's the most effective path to developing tech skills at scale.

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