{"id":4041,"date":"2026-01-06T19:00:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/?p=4041"},"modified":"2026-01-06T19:00:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T17:00:06","slug":"systemd-and-top-level-drop-ins-for-user-units","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/2026\/01\/06\/systemd-and-top-level-drop-ins-for-user-units\/","title":{"rendered":"Systemd and top-level drop-ins for user units"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(This post is just a bit of good old-fashioned search engine fodder. Systemd terminology is frustratingly generic, making it hard to find solutions to specific problems related to it.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m trying out per-user units for the first time, and immediately wanted to also use top-level drop-ins. I couldn&#8217;t find solid documentation for it, but logically, I assumed they would go under <code>~\/.config\/systemd\/user\/service.d\/<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p>This didn&#8217;t seem to work though: <code>systemctl --user cat $unitname<\/code> still only listed the contents of <code>$unitname.service<\/code> without what I had in <code>~\/.config\/systemd\/user\/service.d\/override.conf<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p>After flailing around for a while, I realized I just had to do a <code>systemctl daemon-reload --user<\/code> to make it work.<\/p>\n<p>(I don&#8217;t know if the support for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.freedesktop.org\/software\/systemd\/man\/latest\/systemd.unit.html#:~:text=Top%20level%20drop%2Dins\">top-level drop-ins<\/a> in per-user units was already there when user units themselves arrived, but at least it&#8217;s working for me in Ubuntu 24.04 with systemd version 255.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(This post is just a bit of good old-fashioned search engine fodder. Systemd terminology is frustratingly generic, making it hard to find solutions to specific problems related to it.) I&#8217;m trying out per-user units for the first time, and immediately wanted to also use top-level drop-ins. I couldn&#8217;t find solid documentation for it, but logically, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13685],"class_list":["post-4041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-systemd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4042,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4041\/revisions\/4042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}