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

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?

Does it work with full path instead of $HOME?

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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.

systemd doesn’t use bash to run commands.

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”.

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.

https://serverfault.com/a/750920

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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