'rclone mount' works in command line but not from a systemd unit

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Hello,

I’m running into a problem at writing a systemd unit file to mount a remote storage (webdav/Nextcloud) with rclone. Following command in bash is desired and works as expected:

/usr/bin/rclone mount nextcloud:/ $HOME/.mnt/nextcloud --daemon --vfs-cache-mode full

The resulting systemd unit file resides in ~/.config/systemd/user/rclone-mount-nextcloud.service and looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Mounts a WebDAV directory with rclone
Documentation=man:rclone(1)

[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount nextcloud:/ $HOME/.mnt/nextcloud --daemon --vfs-cache-mode full
ExecStop=/usr/bin/fusermount -u $HOME/.mnt/nextcloud
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

When I start this unit with

systemctl --user start rclone-mount-nextcloud.service

rclone exits with exit code 1, leaving in the journal

Command mount needs 2 arguments minimum: you provided 1 non flag arguments: ["nextcloud:/"]

It seems that systemd doesn’t provide rclone with the second argument (and maybe neither with those flags). Does anyone know how to solve that?

2

Does it work with full path instead of $HOME?

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3

It exits with

rclone-mount-nextcloud.service: Failed with result 'protocol'.

when run with systemd from the unit file but works flawlessly directly from bash.

4

systemd doesn’t use bash to run commands.

5

I know, but how do I find out what exactly the command expansion from ExecStart= looks like? I’ve searched in man(5)systemd.service but could only learn what is allowed. And it doesn’t seem I did something forbidden in my unit file. Nevertheless it’s astonishing that two equal (after shell expansion) commands result in different errors - therefore there must be a difference for systemd.

When changing the line to

/usr/bin/rclone mount nextcloud:/ ${HOME}/.mnt/nextcloud --daemon --vfs-cache-mode full

again it exits with

rclone-mount-nextcloud.service: Failed with result 'protocol'.

Obviously “/home/user” equals “${HOME}” equals not “$HOME”.

6
7

Sorry, but this can’t help me. Expanding any variables in a PreExecStart through bash is futile (I just tested it to be sure) because they’re expanded by bash which obviously differs from expansion by systemd. Since I can’t read C and lack any programming skills this is a dead end for me.

I’ll try someting else.

Okay, wrapping the command in bash -c ‘command’ again fails with result protocol. Seems to me there’s something amiss with systemd.

8

https://serverfault.com/a/750920

9

Good idea, but indeed it is not. I just solved it by working around it. Which is unsatisfying but at least I have a working and robust solution.

I did the following:

  • switched $HOME with /home/user
  • removed the flag –daemon and
  • removed ExecStop=…

It now works as intended. Problem solved although I can’t tell why exactly because from a bash perspective (which is the only one I have) it still is exactly the same.

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