Systemd Cheatsheet¶

Debian adopted systemd in 2015 as the new init system. Systemd is responsible for running different system services.

To start (also stop, restart) a specific systemd service (e.g. nginx):

systemctl start nginx

Enabling and disabling of the aforementioned service:

systemctl enable nginx; systemctl disable nginx

List all possible systemd services in a Linux server:

systemctl list-units --type=service

If we want to display all running systemd services as a tree:

systemctl status

To display the status of some specific service:

systemctl status nginx

Closely connected with systemctl is journalctl - the command for inspecting log-files. To get some information about some system service:

journalctl -xe | grep service_name

The main site of systemd with detailed information:

To study more about systemd, there is a freely downloadable book:

3 surprising things Linux sysadmins can do with systemd: