We've switched from using systemd to manage guix containers and services
to using systemd user services to launch an instance of shepherd which
manages guix containers and services, with some custom sudo rules. As
far as using systemd and guix containers, here's one config that I still
have around¹

Our upgrade scheme was to run 'guix pull' about weekly and then restart
the container. Assuming it didn't break we'd let it ride. If it did
break then we'd have 'guix pull --roll-back' to roll-back and wait it
out or fix it.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 06:17:44PM -0400, conjaroy wrote:
> I'm interested in deploying several system containers to a single cloud
> VPS, and I had originally planned to build those via `guix system
> docker-image`. Although Docker has some nice CLI tools for
> starting/stopping/listing active containers, it occurs to me that an
> alternative (`guix system container`) has at least one significant
> advantage: containers come online in seconds, as opposed to the minutes it
> takes to build and import a Docker image (or tens of minutes, if the build
> host is a VM without /dev/kvm.) It might also be the case that using
> /gnu/store for all containers is more disk-space-efficient than creating
> self-contained Docker images for each one.
> 
> So I was wondering if anyone has experience running long-lived containers
> built via `guix system container` in a production setting. Since I'm
> running Guix on a foreign distro (Debian 10), it seems reasonable to build
> a systemd service around the container script, but there may be pitfalls I
> haven't considered:
> 
> # build container script and register it as a gc root with a well-known
> name.
> guix build --root=/home/guix/my-awesome-container $(guix system container
> -d my-awesome-container.scm)
> 
> cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/my-awesome-container.service
> [Unit]
> Description=My Awesome Container
> 
> [Service]
> ExecStart=/home/guix/my-awesome-container
> TimeoutStopSec=30
> StandardOutput=syslog
> StandardError=syslog
> 
> [Install]
> WantedBy=multi-user.target
> EOF

¹ http://git.genenetwork.org/guix-bioinformatics/guix-bioinformatics/src/branch/master/gn/services/bnw.service


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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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