Creating Your Own Service File with Network Requirements in CentOS

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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

Oct 14, 2025

Duration

30m

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.

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