'systemd apparently not finding .service file

I've put together a foo.service file for our foo service that runs as a daemon. The service runs fine when I run systemctl start foo (and stop) but systemtcl enable foo results in Failed to issue method call: Invalid argument. The unit file is placed in /etc/systemd/system/foo.service, and has permissions 0755. Setting systemd to debug and running enable gives 

Looking for unit files in (highest priority first):`
    /etc/systemd/system
    /run/systemd/system
    /usr/local/lib/systemd/system
    /usr/lib/systemd/system
Looking for SysV init scripts in:
    /etc/rc.d/init.d
Looking for SysV rcN.d links in:
    /etc/rd.c
Failed to issue method call: Invalid argument

Googling around, it seems like systemctl isn't finding the .service file. Is there any way to verify that? If so, how can I fix that? Any other ideas about what might be wrong? Is there more debugging I can enable? The debug info given doesn't really help me narrow down the problem.

foo.service looks like:

[Unit]
Description=Blah Blah Blah

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bar/doof/foo
Type=simple
PIDFile=/var/run/foo.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target,graphical.target

EDIT: Yes, I did run systemctl daemon-reload.

systemd


Solution 1:[1]

For people from Google:

  • Validate with sudo systemd-analyze verify NAME.service
  • When using a symlink, make sure it uses absolute path
  • Make sure the name is like /etc/systemd/system/*.service
  • Do sudo systemctl daemon-reload after changes

Solution 2:[2]

The issue in my case was the file was symlinked from another partition and systemd do not support that.

Unit files have to reside on a partition that is mounted at the moment the host PID 1 is invoked. i.e. either on the root partition or some other partition that the initrd premounts.

I'm answering to an old question because this is a top result while googling on the issue and might help someone

Solution 3:[3]

Error is because of two target are specified to WantedBy. Just mention in this way:

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I really don't know how we can specify two targets to it.

Solution 4:[4]

I found this question over google, searching for "systemctl unit not found"

In my case I generated a *.service file via podman and no matter what I did, systemctl wouldn't find the service file.

Solution was to check selinux and set the correct labels. Example:

/sbin/restorecon -v /etc/systemd/system/container_httpd.service

Solution 5:[5]

I ran into this error when using Podman to generate systemd unit files.

The error occurred because selinux was blocking the file from being properly read. I found there were two solutions.

  1. Set your directory to the systemd service location for unit files with cd /etc/systemd/system. Then use podman generate to create the file directly here. This seems to be accepted by selinux without issue.

  2. Generate the systemd unit file with podman generate and copy the file to /etc/systemd/system. You then need to run /sbin/restorecon -v /etc/systemd/system/container-<your container name>.service to have selinux reset its security context for that file.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Mark
Solution 2 vinzee
Solution 3 slm
Solution 4 N02291
Solution 5

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