Installing Caddy in WSL: systemctl not supported

Help
1

1. Caddy version (caddy version):

2.0.0

2. How I run Caddy:

a. System environment:

Windows 10 WSL Ubuntu 18.04

b. Command:

caddy

c. Service/unit/compose file:

N/A

N/A

N/A

3. The problem I’m having:

I am trying to install Caddy, following the directions here: https://caddyserver.com/docs/install

When trying to run:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable caddy
sudo systemctl start caddy

I get an error message (listed below).

What I want help with is how to substitute the systemctl command with service. More details in section 5.

4. Error messages and/or full log output:

System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can’t operate.

5. What I already tried:

WSL does not support systemd. A possible solution is to upgrade my WSL to WSL2 (requiring me to sign up for Windows 10 Insider Preview Build, which I would like to avoid going to an unstable release for my main computer). With WSL2, this can be used: https://github.com/arkane-systems/genie.

If possible, what I would like to do is use service start to substitute systemctl.

I’ve seen examples online of this with docker, mongodb, postgresql, etc: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/457

I’ve tried to replicate those examples with sudo service start caddy in /usr/bin/caddy with no luck. I get a start: unrecognized service error. To fix this error, I tried doing chmod -R 770 caddy and chgrp -R caddy caddy. It did not resolve the error: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56985500/mysql-unrecognized-service

6. Links to relevant resources:

2

Ultimately this isn’t really a question about Caddy but about WSL. I have WSL2 set up so I can’t really try anything to help.

Maybe something like supervisord works instead?

FYI the service command is just a shortcut layer to systemctl. I’m pretty sure it won’t work either as long as systemd isn’t used.

3

Did you use genie for your WSL2 setup? I’m willing to upgrade if it’s the simplest option.

4

I simply don’t run Caddy as a service inside WSL. I only use it debugging issues that people on these forums encounter. I use NSSM to run caddy.exe as a service on Windows.

You might not even need a process manager, you could just use the caddy start command which runs Caddy as a background process. You can run caddy stop to stop it, etc.

5

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.