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An important part of preparing an operating-system declaration is
listing system services and their configuration (see Using the Configuration System). System services are typically daemons launched
when the system boots, or other actions needed at that time—e.g.,
configuring network access.
Guix has a broad definition of “service” (see Service Composition), but many services are managed by the GNU Shepherd
(see Shepherd Services). On a running system, the herd
command allows you to list the available services, show their status,
start and stop them, or do other specific operations (see Jump
Start in The GNU Shepherd Manual). For example:
# herd status
The above command, run as root, lists the currently defined
services. The herd doc command shows a synopsis of the given
service and its associated actions:
# herd doc nscd Run libc's name service cache daemon (nscd). # herd doc nscd action invalidate invalidate: Invalidate the given cache--e.g., 'hosts' for host name lookups.
The start, stop, and restart sub-commands
have the effect you would expect. For instance, the commands below stop
the nscd service and restart the Xorg display server:
# herd stop nscd Service nscd has been stopped. # herd restart xorg-server Service xorg-server has been stopped. Service xorg-server has been started.
For some services, herd configuration returns the name of the
service’s configuration file, which can be handy to inspect its
configuration:
# herd configuration sshd /gnu/store/…-sshd_config
The following sections document the available services, starting with
the core services, that may be used in an operating-system
declaration.
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