Ensure systemd services restart on failure

I wrote a post a while ago covering the use of Monit to monitor services running and the use case I covered was to ensure these services restarted on failure. While a useful feature of Monit, it seems to be now a little redundant with SystemD having a built in restart feature.

Same use case where MySQL (or MariaDB in this case) is being killed by Apache’s oom killer.

I first copied the original systemd file associated with Mariadb from /usr/lib/systemd/system/mariadb.service to /etc/systemd/system/mariadb.service

Then under the [Service] section in the file i added the following 2 lines:

Restart=always RestartSec=3

After saving the file we need to reload the daemon configurations to ensure systemd is aware of the new file

systemctl daemon-reload

Then restart the service to enable the changes.

systemctl restart mariadb

You can test this configuration by firing a kill to the process, e.g.:

 ps -ef|grep maria

mysql    22701 22542  0 06:52 ?        00:00:01 /usr/libexec/mysqld –basedir=/usr –datadir=/var/lib/mysql –plugin-dir=/usr/lib64/mysql/plugin –log-error=/var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log –pid-file=/var/run/mariadb/mariadb.pid –socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

kill 22701

watch “ps -ef|grep maria”

You should see the process restart.

• Linux-2
• Process-Monitoring
• Systemd