Systemd Unit

How we use systemd

systemd has become the standard way of defining and managing services on all major Linux distributions. Our .deb and .rpm packages will automatically install a systemd unit for the NoPorts daemon sshnpd into /lib/systemd/system/sshnpd.service:

[Unit]
Description=NoPorts Daemon
After=network-online.target

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
KillMode=process

# The line below runs the sshnpd service, with the config from
# /etc/noports/sshnpd.yaml
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sshnpd

override.conf

We also create an /etc/systemd/system/sshnpd.service.d/override.conf that's primarily used to set the username that NoPorts runs as. The template (without comments) is:

[Service]
User=1000

1000 will be replaced by universal.sh with the username of the user running the install script. To set it manually, or change it to another user, run sudo systemctl edit sshnpd . Once changes have been made then run sudo systemctl daemon-reload to pick up the changes then sudo systemctl restart sshnpd to restart the daemon. You can follow the daemon logs with journalctl -u sshnpd -f .

NoPorts daemon config - sshnpd.yaml

The expected location for NoPorts daemon config is at /etc/noports/sshnpd.yaml and that file should be edited to reflect your choice of device and client names etc. At a minimum the sections marked TODO must be filled out correctly.

Config migration

Previous versions of NoPorts put config into environment variables in systemd units and then passed those into command line arguments for the daemon.

When upgrading with universal.sh those variables will be migrated from the systemd units to sshnpd.yaml . If you've created a very complex config please check that the migration has completed correctly.