lapis-systemd is a lapis extension that lets you create systemd service files for your websites and log to the systemd journal easily.

$ luarocks install lapis-systemd

You can use the new systemd command to generate service files for different environments. From your shell:

$ lapis systemd service development

Will generate a file in the current directory, named after your app: some-app-development.service

The contents might look like this:

[Unit]
Description=some-app development
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
PIDFile=/home/leafo/code/sites/itch.io/logs/nginx.pid
Environment='LUA_PATH=;;/home/leafo/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/?.lua;/home/leafo/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/?/init.lua' 'LUA_CPATH=;;/home/leafo/.luarocks/lib/lua/5.1/?.so'
WorkingDirectory=/home/leafo/code/sites/itch.io
ExecStart=/home/leafo/.luarocks/bin/lapis server development
ExecReload=/home/leafo/.luarocks/bin/lapis build development

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note that the path of your project is hard-coded into the service, along with the path of the lapis binary and any Lua environment variables. If you ever move the project around or reconfigure your system you should regenerate the service file.

Since these paths are specific to a machine, it's not recommended to check the service files into your respository.

You can generate and install the service file to the system with the following command: (Do not run this command with sudo, it will call sudo for you when copying the necessary file.)

$ lapis systemd service development --install

You can then start your service:

$ sudo systemctl start some-app-development

And view the logs for it:

$ sudo journal -u some-app-development

The systemd entry in your lapis config can be used to control how the service file is generated:

-- config.lua
local config = require("lapis.config")

config("production", {
  systemd = {
    user = "leafo" -- service will run as user
  }
})

If you want to enable journal log writes (when using the log function in lapis.systemd.journal) then you can set journal = true in systmed config block:

-- config.lua
local config = require("lapis.config")

config("production", {
  systemd = {
    user = "leafo",
    journal = true
  }
})

You can access the systemd journal with the lapis.systemd.journal module:

journal = require("lapis.systemd.journal")
journal.log("hello world!", {priority = 5})