How to Manage System Services with systemctl

systemctl is the primary tool for managing services on modern Linux distributions.

Common Commands

# Check service status
systemctl status nginx

# Start a service
systemctl start nginx

# Stop a service
systemctl stop nginx

# Restart a service
systemctl restart nginx

# Reload configuration (no downtime)
systemctl reload nginx

# Enable service at boot
systemctl enable nginx

# Disable service at boot
systemctl disable nginx

List Services

# All running services
systemctl list-units --type=service --state=running

# All enabled services
systemctl list-unit-files --type=service --state=enabled

View Logs

journalctl -u nginx -f

The -f flag follows the log in real-time.