Preventing tmux session created by systemd from automatically terminating on Ctrl+C

Question

Since a few days I'm successfully running the new Minecraft Bedrock Edition dedicated server on my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS home server. Because it should be available 24/7 and automatically startup after boot I created a systemd service for a detached tmux session:

tmux.minecraftserver.service

[Unit]
Description=tmux minecraft_server detached

[Service]
Type=forking
WorkingDirectory=/home/mine/minecraftserver
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tmux new -s minecraftserver -d "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. /home/mine/minecraftser$
User=mine

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Everything works as expected but there's one tiny thing that keeps bugging me:

How can I prevent tmux from terminating it's whole session when I press Ctrl+C ? I just want to terminate the Minecraft server process itself instead of the whole tmux session. When starting the server from the command line in a manually created tmux session this does work (session stays alive) but not when the session was brought up by systemd.

Answer 1

I as able to solve this by using systemd's ExecStartPost and tmux's send-keys like this:

[Unit]
Description=tmux minecraft_server detached

[Service]
Type=forking
WorkingDirectory=/home/mine/minecraftserver
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tmux new -d -s minecraftserver
ExecStartPost=/usr/bin/tmux send-keys -t minecraftserver "cd /home/mine/minecraftserver/" Enter "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./bedrock_server" Enter

User=mine

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Answer 2

When starting the server from the command line in a manually created tmux session this does work (session stays alive) but not when the session was brought up by systemd.

The difference between these situations is actually unrelated to systemd. In one case, you’re starting the server from a shell within the tmux session, and when the server terminates, control returns to the shell. In the other case, you’re starting the server directly within the tmux session, and when it terminates there’s no shell to return to, so the tmux session also dies.

tmux has an option to keep the session alive after the process inside it dies (look for remain-on-exit in the manpage), but that’s probably not what you want: you want to be able to return to an interactive shell, to restart the server, investigate why it died, or perform maintenance tasks, for example. So it’s probably better to change your command to this:

'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. /home/mine/minecraftserver/…; exec bash'

That is, first run the server, and then, after it terminates, replace the process (the shell which tmux implicitly spawns to run the command, but which will then exit) with another, interactive shell. (For some other ways to get an interactive shell after the command exits, see e. g. this question – but note that the <(echo commands) syntax suggested in the top answer is not available in systemd unit files.)