Preventing Ubuntu 16.04 from starting daemons when a package is installed

I’ve gone on some mini-rants in other posts about starting daemons immediately after they’re installed in Ubuntu and Debian. Things are a little different in Ubuntu 16.04 and I thought it might be helpful to share some tips for that release.

Before we do that, let’s go over something. I still don’t understand why this is a common practice within Ubuntu and Debian.

Take a look at the postinst-systemd-start script within the init-systems-helpers package (source link):

if [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
    systemctl --system daemon-reload >/dev/null || true
    deb-systemd-invoke start #UNITFILES# >/dev/null || true
fi

The daemon-reload is totally reasonable. We must tell systemd that we just deployed a new unit file or it won’t know we did it. However, the next line makes no sense. Why would you immediately force the daemon to start (or restart)? The deb-systemd-invoke script does check to see if the unit is disabled before taking action on it, which is definitely a good thing. However, this automatic management of running daemons shouldn’t be handled by a package manager.

If you don’t want your package manager handling your daemons, you have a few options:

The policy-rc.d method #

This method involves creating a script called /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d with a special exit code:

# echo -e '#!/bin/bash\nexit 101' > /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
# chmod +x /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
# /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
# echo $?
101

This script is checked by the deb-systemd-invoke script in the init-systems-helpers package (source link). As long as this script is in place, dpkg triggers won’t cause daemons to start, stop, or restart.

You can start your daemon at any time with systemctl start service_name whenever you’re ready.

The systemd mask method #

If you need to prevent a single package from starting after installation, you can use systemd’s mask feature for that. When you run systemctl mask nginx, it will symlink /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service to /dev/null. When systemd sees that, it won’t start the daemon.

However, since the package isn’t installed yet, we can just mask it with a symlink:

# ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service

You can install nginx now, configure it to meet your requirements, and start the service. Just run:

# systemctl enable nginx
# systemctl start nginx