Starting with systemd only works as root

[julian]

Regular user cannot own /root... probably. Either way it's probably a bad idea to do it that way.

Reinstall nodebb under the /home/nodebb, and run it as the nodebb user.

[julian]

... oh yeah, and then chown -R root:root /root to fix the incorrect permissions for that folder too.

[doekia]

Here is a working .service, but I concur with @julian, do not put your nodebb inside the /root folder. Pretty good chance it will ruin your security at some point.

[Unit]
Description=NodeBB
Documentation=https://docs.nodebb.org
After=system.slice multi-user.target mongod.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=nodebb

StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=nodebb

WorkingDirectory=/var/www/nodebb/NodeBB/
ExecStart=/usr/bin/env node loader.js --no-silent --no-daemon
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[scottalanmiller]

@wayne-workman said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

My nodebb directory is here: /root/nodebb

This is the private home directory for the root user. It's sole purpose is to lock things down to root. Use /opt for system level software.

[julian]

@scottalanmiller I always wondered... Is it an anti pattern to change ownership of folders in /opt to specific users? I always assumed everything in there was supposed to be owned by root too

[scottalanmiller]

@julian said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

@scottalanmiller I always wondered... Is it an anti pattern to change ownership of folders in /opt to specific users? I always assumed everything in there was supposed to be owned by root too

/opt is definitely open to "user owned" files. We assume that it will be "service users" rather than end users. So users like apache, nodebb, etc.

You would treat /opt exactly the same as you would treat /var/www/html which "always" uses a service user for file ownership.

[The Worms]

@scottalanmiller said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

@wayne-workman said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

My nodebb directory is here: /root/nodebb

This is the private home directory for the root user. It's sole purpose is to lock things down to root. Use /opt for system level software.

or /srv

[julian]

... ahh, Linux

While you're here why don't you symlink /usr/bin/nodebb to /opt/nodebb/nodebb?

[scottalanmiller]

@The-Worms said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

@scottalanmiller said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

@wayne-workman said in Starting with systemd only works as root:

My nodebb directory is here: /root/nodebb

This is the private home directory for the root user. It's sole purpose is to lock things down to root. Use /opt for system level software.

or /srv

That works, too. But is non-standard. I prefer /opt because of 50 years of where we expect the software to go.

But I use /srv sometimes, too.

[wayne.workman]

I did get this working.
I moved the nodebb working directory to /home/nodebb/nodebb and changed ownership of that to nodebb:nodebb, now it starts up on boot as the nodebb user just fine.

Thank you all very much for the help.