On Thu, 4 May 2017, Jason Welsh wrote:

hey folks, we are migrating our tomcat setup over to centos 7. Im converting init-scripts over to systemd services and whatnot.. One thing that Ive noticed is that my systemd startup script cant seem to write to /var/run as a non-root user to drop a pidfile.. If I create a directory in /var/run owned by my user, it gets wiped out on reboot.

Ive searched and found this

https://blog.hqcodeshop.fi/archives/93-Handling-varrun-with-systemd.html

which says to use ExecStartPre to fudge creating directories in /var/run so what non-root users can write there..

Is that the suggested way to do this? It seems awful kludgey.

There are a couple of systemd-ish ways to handle this: tmpfiles or within the tomcat service file.

The canonical method is to drop a configuration into /etc/tmpfiles.d/:

# /etc/tmpfiles.d/tomcat.conf # this assumes tomcat daemon runs as user tomcat and # group tomcat. alter as necessary. d /run/tomcat 0700 tomcat tomcat -

See the systemd-tmpfiles(8) and tmpfiles.d(5) man pages. After you install that file, do

systemd-tmpfiles --create

The second method is to add an ExecStartPre to /usr/lib/systemd/system/tomcat.service, e.g.,

[Service] Type=simple EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/tomcat # this assumes that TOMCAT_USER is defined correctly # in the EnvironmentFile ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/install -d \ -o ${TOMCAT_USER} -m 0700 /run/tomcat ExecStart=/usr/libexec/tomcat/server start # etc etc

If you go that route, then after editing the service file, do

systemctl daemon-reload systemctl start tomcat

I'd recommend the tmpfiles route myself, but either will get you where you want to go.