okay so I figured out NGINX, I hope. but systemd looks like it’s going to be even more complicated T_T

systemd actually has really good documentation, though. which is probably why FOSS-bros hate it so much /hj

oh man systemd does my favorite software thing where it silently fails and won’t tell me why it failed except for a very cryptic and generic error message that I have to actively ask it to provide

me: hey systemd, please run gags.service

systemd:

me: hey systemd, how is gags.service going?

systemd: failed

me: uhh alright so… do you have any idea what went wrong? any logfiles or error messages whatsoever?

systemd: failed

alright that’s enough Linuxing™ for today. this sucks and I have no idea how to even begin to troubleshoot it

@kasdeya nothing in the journal? The only thing worse than a silent failure is a "Success: Failed" popup.

@kasdeya I wish I could help, but you are venturing beyond where I have gone myself. Hopefully that helps you calibrate, sounds like you've achieved a fair amount! Hope you enjoy the rest of your night and can figure it out next time you come back to it :)

@kasdeya From memory, `journalctl` is the command to get the stdout/stderr from the failing process.

That, of course, presumed the process output something meaningful to the console. If not, you'll have to figure out where it does log to for more information.

@kasdeya open offer to help troubleshoot (optionally at another time when you're less frustrated with it), this is something we have a fair bit of experience with

@codingcoyote omg thank you! I didn’t realize that the journal showed different log entries than systemctl status <service name>. that’s where the error messages were hiding and I was able to get it working

@Shivaekul aw omg thank you! I was actually able to get everything working after I was reminded that the journalctl command exists, thankfully. and that definitely helps to put this into perspective, too - I appreciate it

@StryderNotavi thank you! you were right - I assumed that I would see any relevant logs when I ran systemctl status <service name> or maybe dmesg but the error messages were hiding in journalctl the whole time, and I was able to get my service working!

@kasdeya I only learned about that recently when I was trying to figure out my dnsmasq issues! Glad you got it working, congratulations!