I want to "activate" a virtualenv in a systemd service file.
I would like to avoid having a shell process between the systemd process and the python interpreter.
My current solution looks like this:
[Unit]
Description=fooservice
After=syslog.target network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=fooservice
WorkingDirectory={{ venv_home }}
ExecStart={{ venv_home }}/fooservice --serve-in-foreground
Restart=on-abort
EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/fooservice.env
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
/etc/sysconfig/fooservice.env
PATH={{ venv_home }}/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
PYTHONPATH={{ venv_home }}/...
VIRTUAL_ENV={{ venv_home }}
But I am having trouble. I get ImportErrors since some entries in sys.path
are missing.
The virtualenv is "baked into the Python interpreter in the virtualenv". So for most cases this means you can launch python
or console_scripts
directly in that virtualenv and don't need to activate the virtualenv first or manage PATH
yourself.
Note: Replace {{ venv_home }}
with the venv home dir to use:
ExecStart={{ venv_home }}/bin/fooservice --serve-in-foreground
or
ExecStart={{ venv_home }}/bin/python {{ venv_home }}/fooservice.py --serve-in-foreground
and remove the EnvironmentFile
entry.
To verify that it is indeed correct you can check sys.path
by running
{{ venv_home }}/bin/python -m site
and comparing the output to
python -m site