lazysystemd

A minimal terminal UI for monitoring and controlling systemd services. Think lazydocker, but for systemd.

⚠️ Experimental - This is a work-in-progress. Things might break, change, or disappear.

What is this?

A simple TUI that lets you:

• See your systemd services at a glance
• View logs in real-time
• Start, stop, restart, and reload services
• All from your terminal, no GUI needed

Installation

From Source

# Build it
make build

# Install to /usr/local/bin (requires sudo)
sudo make install

# Or install to a custom location
sudo make install PREFIX=/opt/lazysystemd

# Uninstall
sudo make uninstall

Debian Package

# Install build deps (if needed)
sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper golang-go gzip

# You may need newer go: 
wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.22.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.22.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/go /usr/local/bin/go

# Build the package
dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us

# Install it
sudo dpkg -i ../lazysystemd_1.0.0-1_amd64.deb

The package installs to:

• /usr/bin/lazysystemd
• /etc/lazysystemd/config.example.yaml

Quick Start

# Run it (config will be created automatically if missing)
lazysystemd

That's it. No dependencies beyond Go and systemd.

Configuration

The app defaults to reading configuration from:

• /usr/local/etc/lazysystemd/config.yaml

If the file doesn't exist, it will be created automatically as an empty file. If the file is empty, you'll see a message: reading yaml from ... and is empty

Create a config.yaml file listing the services you want to monitor:

services:
  - my-service.service
  - another-service.service

You can also specify a custom config path:

lazysystemd -config /path/to/config.yaml

Controls

Key	Action
↑ / k	Move up
↓ / j	Move down
g	Jump to top
G	Jump to bottom
s	Start service
t	Stop service
r	Restart service
L	Reload selected service
e	Enable selected service
d	Disable selected service
l	systemctl daemon-reload
f	Toggle live log following
R	Refresh all services statuses
q	Quit

Status Indicators

• ● = Active and running
• ○ = Inactive
• ✗ = Failed
• → = Activating
• ← = Deactivating
• ? = Unknown/Error

Enabled/disabled indicator (shown next to the active state):

• E = enabled
• D = disabled
• S = static
• M = masked

How It Works

• Uses systemctl show to get service status (parses key=value output)
• Uses journalctl -u for logs
• Follow mode streams with journalctl -f
• Built with Bubble Tea for the TUI

Requirements

• Linux with systemd
• Go 1.22+ (for building)

Known Issues

• If you hit Go module cache issues with uniseg, try: go clean -modcache && go mod tidy

Contributing

This is experimental, so:

• Feel free to open issues
• PRs welcome (but no promises on merge speed)

License

MIT

Why?

I wanted a simple way to monitor a few systemd services without opening multiple terminal windows or remembering service names.