Attention

Qubes OS 4.2 has reached end of life - it is no longer supported and thus will no longer receive security updates, bug fixes, or new features. We recommend to perform an in-place upgrade or perform a clean installation of Qubes 4.3! The documentation of version 4.2 will also not receive any new updates, unless bug fixes. Its state is thus archived.

Qubes service

Warning

This page is intended for advanced users.

Usage documentation is in the qvm-service man page. There are also described predefined services.

Under the hood, an enabled service in a VM is signaled by a file in /var/run/qubes-service. This can be used to implement an almost enable/disable per-VM switch controlled by dom0.

Adding support for systemd services is pretty simple. In the VM, create the following file (and directory, if needed): /etc/systemd/system/<service name>.service.d/30_qubes.conf. It should contain the following:

[Unit]
ConditionPathExists=/var/run/qubes-service/<service name>

This will cause the service to be started only when you enable it with qvm-service for this VM.