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Alexandru Bucur
Alexandru Bucur

Posted on • Originally published at alexandrubucur.com on

Systemctl shows service file Not Found even though .service file is present

Hi All,

I'm writing a step by step setup for a self hosted gitea instance (on CentOS 7) and hit the stupidest bug (if you can call it that) of systemd.
After writing the gitea service file I was getting the following error:

[root@gitea ~]# systemctl start giteaselfhost
Failed to start giteaselfhost.service: Unit not found.
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After a few hours of maddening permission checks and debugging, the problem was that I had a Requires dependency to a service file that wasn't there.

Removing the broken dependency made the service work, so hopefully at some point systemd will give nicer errors when missing dependencies.

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