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Environment

Service Environment

Finit supports sourcing environment variables from /etc/default/*, or similar --with-sysconfig=DIR. This is a common pattern from SysV init scripts, where the start-stop script is a generic script for the given service, foo, and the options for the service are sourced from the file /etc/default/foo. Like this:

  • /etc/default/foo:

    FOO_OPTIONS=--extra-arg="bar" -s -x

  • /etc/finit.conf:

    service foo {
    description = "Example foo daemon"
    runlevel    = "2345"
    envfile     = "-/etc/default/foo"
    command     = "foo -n $FOO_OPTIONS"
}

Here the service foo is started with -n, to make sure it runs in the foreground, and the with the options found in the environment file. With the ps command we can see that the process is started with:

foo -n --extra-arg=bar -s -x

Note

For a service with pam, the session environment is applied before envfile, so the file overrides anything pam_env set.

The leading - on envfile determines if Finit should treat a missing environment file as blocking the start of the service or not. When - is used, a missing environment file does not block the start. The same mark works on command, where it means carry on if the binary is missing.