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Why forking is used in a unit file of a service?

6 votes
3 answers
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My nginx unitfile is following,
[root@arif ~]# cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service
[Unit]
Description=The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server
After=network.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target

[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/run/nginx.pid
# Nginx will fail to start if /run/nginx.pid already exists but has the wrong
# SELinux context. This might happen when running nginx -t from the cmdline.
# https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1268621 
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/rm -f /run/nginx.pid
ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nginx
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
KillSignal=SIGQUIT
TimeoutStopSec=5
KillMode=process
PrivateTmp=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Here, in the [Service] portion, the value of Type is equal to forking which means from here , > The process started with ExecStart spawns a child process that becomes the main process of the service. The parent process exits when the startup is complete. My questions are, - Why a service does that? - What are the advantages for doing this? - What's wrong is Type=simple or other similar options?
Asked by arif (1589 rep)
Mar 4, 2019, 07:43 PM
Last activity: Jul 22, 2024, 09:49 AM