Wouter Dullaert

Home About

BubbleUPnP Server with Systemd on Ubuntu Vivid

Convert the Service From an Upstart Job to a Systemd Unit

Wouter Dullaert, on 26 May 2015

For Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid, Canonical replaced their own init system Upstart with the de facto standard in the linux world for this kind of job: Systemd. Even though this is a very big change under the hood, all my upgrades went extremely smooth. None of the official packages had any problems whatsoever. The only problem I had was with a 3rd party application, installed from a ppa: BubbleUPnP server.

BubbleUPnP server is a companion app to the BubbleUPnP app on android. It is a completely optional component and provides features like persistent playlists accross various DLNA renderers or transcoding when casting to a chromecast. The authors provide a PPA with Ubuntu packages, but this only ships with an Upstart job. The package will therefore not start as a service or at boot anymore.

I’ve spent some time converting the upstart script into a systemd service. Hopefully this will be useful to some people.

Create a Systemd Service

  1. Delete the old Upstart scripts /etc/init/bubbleupnpserver.conf and /etc/init.d/bubbleupnpserver. They will confuse Systemd

  2. Create the file /usr/share/bubbleupnpserver/startService.sh This script will run before the server starts and make sure it picks up on the configuration specified in /etc/default/bubbleupnpserver

    ```bash #!/bin/bash

    if [ -f “$DEFAULTFILE” ]; then . “$DEFAULTFILE” else USER=root DATADIR=/root/.bubbleupnpserver HTTP_PORT=58050 HTTPS_PORT=58051 fi

    # Make sure daemon is started with system locale if [ -r /etc/default/locale ]; then . /etc/default/locale export LANG fi

    OPTS=”-dataDir ${DATADIR} -httpPort ${HTTP_PORT} -httpsPort ${HTTPS_PORT} -nologstdout” ```

  3. Create the file /lib/systemd/system/bubbleupnpserver.service This is the actual Systemd Unit describing the service.

    ```ini [Unit] Description=BubbleUPnP Server Requires=network-online.target After=network-online.target

    [Service] Type=simple Environment=DEFAULTFILE=/etc/default/bubbleupnpserver Restart=on-failure ExecStartPre=/usr/share/bubbleupnpserver/startService.sh ExecStart=/usr/share/bubbleupnpserver/launch.sh ${OPTS}

    [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target ```

  4. Start the server in your current session by running either of the following commands:

    bash service bubbleupnpserver start

    bash systemctl start bubbleupnpserver.service

  5. Register the service to start at boot by running systemctl enable bubbleupnpserver.service.

Improvements

This version ignores the USER variable you can set in /etc/default/bubbleupnpserver. You can add that in by changing the ExecStart line to:

ExecStart=/bin/su - ${USER} -c "/usr/share/bubbleupnpserver/launch.sh ${OPTS}"

I haven’t tested that though.

Further Reading