Document how to apply local tmpfiles.d override

[kaihendry]

Submission type

• Request for enhancement (RFE)

systemd version the issue has been seen with

238.51-1

Used distribution

Archlinux

In case of bug report: Expected behaviour you didn't see

Ability to restart tempfiles.d service in light of a local /etc/tmpfiles.d/smokeping.conf

In case of bug report: Unexpected behaviour you saw

[hendry@study ~]$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-tmpfiles-setup
Failed to restart systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service: Operation refused, unit systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service may be requested by dependency only (it is configured
to refuse manual start/stop).
See system logs and 'systemctl status systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service' for details.

[poettering]

That's a safety precaution as specific tmpfiles rules are "destructive", they do stuff you really only want to do during early boot, and never later on. We mark those rules with ! in the tmpfiles snippets, and systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service passes --boot to the process which enables them, and then mark the service so that you cannot explicitly restart it as protection against accidentlly destroying your system during runtime.

Just invoke the binary on the command line with: systemd-tmpfiles --create --remove or so (and without --boot) to apply your modified tmpfiles snippets without all this

[poettering]

Anyway, we could probably document the suggested command to apply changed configuration files in the documentation of those configuration files. We should probably not just do that for tmpfiles.d/ but for all our configuration files, actually, as it appears to be generally useful

[jrollins]

The documentation actually already describes how to do this, but it appears to not actually jive with the commands behavior. From systemd-tmpfiles(8):

If invoked with no arguments, it applies all directives from all configuration files. If one or more
absolute filenames are passed on the command line, only the directives in these files are applied.
If "-" is specified instead of a filename, directives are read from standard input. If only the
basename of a configuration file is specified, all configuration directories as specified in
tmpfiles.d(5) are searched for a matching file.

However, trying this produces an error:

root@h1guardian1:~# systemd-tmpfiles
You need to specify at least one of --clean, --create or --remove.
root@h1guardian1:~# systemd-tmpfiles /etc/tmpfiles.d/coredump.conf
You need to specify at least one of --clean, --create or --remove.
root@h1guardian1:~# systemd-tmpfiles - < /etc/tmpfiles.d/coredump.conf
You need to specify at least one of --clean, --create or --remove.
root@h1guardian1:~# 

So I agree that at least clarification in the documentation is in order, or change of behavior to correspond to the documentation.

[keszybz]

On a related note, maybe we should add an option like -a/--all that'd be the same as --clean --create --remove, to make it easier to run from commandline?