Per-User Services

Sometimes it can be nice to have user-specific runit services. For example, you might want to open an ssh tunnel as the current user, run a virtual machine, or regularly run daemons on your behalf. The most common way to do this is to create a system-level service that runs runsvdir(8) as your user, in order to start and monitor the services in a personal services directory.

For example, you could create a service called /etc/sv/runsvdir-<username> with the following run script:

export USER="<username>" export HOME="/home/<username>"

groups="$(id -Gn "$USER" | tr ' ' ':')" svdir="$HOME/service"

exec chpst -u "$USER:$groups" runsvdir "$svdir" ```

In this example [chpst(8)](https://man.voidlinux.org/chpst.8) is used to
start a new [runsvdir(8)](https://man.voidlinux.org/runsvdir.8) process as
the specified user. [chpst(8)](https://man.voidlinux.org/chpst.8) does not
read groups on its own, but expects the user to list all required groups
separated by a `:`. The `id` and `tr` pipe is used to create a list of all
the user's groups in a way [chpst(8)](https://man.voidlinux.org/chpst.8)
understands it. Note that we export `$USER` and `$HOME` because some user
services may not work without them.

The user can then create new services or symlinks to them in the
`/home/<username>/service` directory. To control the services using the
[sv(8)](https://man.voidlinux.org/sv.8) command, the user can specify the
services by path, or by name if the `SVDIR` environment variable is set to
the user's services directory. This is shown in the following examples:

``` $ sv status ~/service/* run: /home/duncan/service/gpg-agent: (pid 901)
33102s run: /home/duncan/service/ssh-agent: (pid 900) 33102s $
SVDIR=~/service sv restart gpg-agent ok: run: gpg-agent: (pid 19818) 0s ```

It may be convenient to export the `SVDIR=~/service` variable in your shell
profile.