[dextercd]

You can use systemd-run with --shell (or a subset of options enabled by --shell) and -p to specify service properties to run commands interactively in a similar environment as your service.

This can help troubleshoot issues and makes experimenting with systemd options faster.

I think there's been some talk about adding a built-in way for systemd-run to copy settings out of a .service file, but it doesn't exist yet.

I've written Perl/Python scripts to do this for me. They're not really aimed at working with arbitrary services, but it should be possible to adapt to different scenarios.

https://gist.github.com/dextercd/59a7e5e25b125d3506c78caa3dd...

There are some gotchas I ran into. For example, with RuntimeDirectory: systemd deletes the directory once the process exits, even if there's still another process running with the same RuntimeDirectory value set.

[matheusmoreira]

I use systemd-run very often to impose CPU usage limits on software. Awesome feature.

[mpyne]

It's also really useful for doing parallel builds of modules that may actually consume all available memory when you can't force the build system to use fewer cores than you have available.

Both in terms of artificially reducing the number of CPUs you expose, but also in terms of enforcing a memory limit that will kill all processes in the build before the broader kernel OOM killer will act, in case you screw up the number of CPUs.

[Imustaskforhelp]

woah that's actually awesome. I feel like adding uh storage usage limits could also be easy as well.

But the one thing that I always wonder is about (virtualization?) in the sense of something like docker just for containerizing or some sort of way of running them in some sort of sandbox without much performance issues or something, I am kinda interested in knowing what might be the best way of doing so (is podman the right way or some other way like bubblewrap?)

Edit: just discovered in the comment below the (parents parents?)comment that there is systemd isolation too, that sounds very interesting and the first time I personally heard of it hmm

[dextercd]

Here's the Python version I've been using: https://gist.github.com/dextercd/3bd65c1e32635b9e7bebf287b52...

Another issue I just ran into is that a colon separated value for ExecSearchPath doesn't work in systemd-run/-p. You have to specify each path as a separate -p argument.

There are some minor annoyances like that, but it's not too hard to work around.