How to specify owner of created /usr/share/<project> in systemd unit

[el-dom]

Hey.

I'm currently trying to deploy a play 2.4 application using the native-packager's debian and systemd support
My stripped down build.sbt looks as follows

val generalSettings = Seq(
  ...
  serverLoading in Debian := ServerLoader.Systemd,
  daemonUser in Linux := "deploy",
  daemonGroup in Linux := "deploy"
)

lazy val shop = project.in(file("modules/shop"))
  .settings(generalSettings: _*)
  .enablePlugins(PlayScala, JavaServerAppPackaging, JDebPackaging)```

and the generated systemd unit looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=shop
Requires=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/usr/share/shop
ExecStart=/usr/share/shop/bin/shop
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
Restart=always
RestartSec=60
User=deploy
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /run/shop
ExecStartPre=/bin/chown deploy:deploy /run/shop
ExecStartPre=/bin/chmod 755 /run/shop
PermissionsStartOnly=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

My problem is now, that the target server needs elevated rights for installing the generated .deb package via dpkg. Thus, the folder /user/share/shop is owned by root after installation, but the systemd service is started by deploy. As a result play won't start with java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/share/shop/RUNNING_PID (Permission denied)

Is there a way to tell the packager that the systemd service should chown the /usr/share/<project> folder for the user specified by the daemonUser SettingKey? Or do i need to create a custom template for doing this?

If the latter, where would I put this template? The documentation at [http://www.scala-sbt.org/sbt-native-packager/archetypes/java_server/customize.html#override-start-script](Override Start Script) says it should be put at /src/templates, but there is no such folder in a play application. Can the template location be customized?

[muuki88]

Hi @el-dom

Thanks for your detailed bug report. You are hitting a common issue with configuring play for production. Play, by default, has a custom pid handling, which you can disable. There is also a small section on native packager and in our documentation. The best way is to disable plays pid handling.

Important take away: /usr/share/<yourapp> is and should always be owned by root. If you need write access to the file system. The JavaServerAppPackaging archetype provides to folders

• /var/log/<yourapp> - write log files
• /var/run/<yourapp - you could add a pid file here

[el-dom]

My bad. I somehow completely missed that part of the documentation. Sorry for bothering you. Thanks a lot :)

[muuki88]

No problem :)