Running Cells as a service with Systemd

When deployed in a production environment, we generally advise to run Pydio Cells as a systemd service.

The present guide explains you how to do it on a Linux box, assuming that you have followed our recommended best practices during the installation process. Adapt to your specific setup if necessary.

Thus you have:

• defined CELLS_WORKING_DIR as /var/cells
• the downloaded binary at /opt/pydio/bin/cells
• a pydio user that has correct (read and execute) permissions on /opt/pydio and /var/cells.

Create a new /etc/systemd/system/cells.service file with following content:

[Unit]
Description=Pydio Cells
Documentation=https://pydio.com
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
AssertFileIsExecutable=/opt/pydio/bin/cells

[Service]
User=pydio
Group=pydio
WorkingDirectory=/home/pydio
PermissionsStartOnly=true

AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
ExecStart=/opt/pydio/bin/cells start
Restart=on-failure
StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=inherit
LimitNOFILE=65536
TimeoutStopSec=5
KillSignal=INT
SendSIGKILL=yes
SuccessExitStatus=0

# Add environment variables
Environment=CELLS_ENABLE_METRICS=false
Environment=CELLS_WORKING_DIR=/var/cells

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then, enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl enable --now cells

Various Notes

Loging

With the above configuration, Pydio Cells logs in rolling text files of 10MB under <CELLS_WORKING_DIR>/logs/ folder. Typically, on Linux:

tail -200f /var/cells/logs/pydio.log

It is worth noting that logs are also outputed to the systemd standard loging system so that you can also see them with e.g.:

sudo journalctl -fu cells --since "1 hour ago"

Systemd working directory

In the above file, we also overwrite the default systemd configuration for the working directory by using:

...
[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/pydio
...

Please note that this directory must exist and be writable before launching the application.

If it is not the case, the system fails to start with a message that can be quite cryptic for people that are not systemd fluent:

...
code=exited, status=200/CHDIR
...