tmux-continuum is overwriting the systemd user service

[wizonesolutions]

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Re: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum/blob/master/docs/systemd_details.md

This doc says that:

The first time tmux starts when @continuum-boot is set to 'on' tmux-continuum will generate a user level systemd unit file which it will save to ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/tmux.service and enable it.

However, in practice, it appears to be doing this every time tmux starts. I go in and edit that file because I want to make it static (so that I can start tmux with my own script and make sure the env vars I want pass through, but still have things saved when I shut down [the ExecStop, etc.])...but my changes are reverted. I'm not sure if they are reverted on shutdown, startup, or daemon-reload, to be honest.

I will put in an override instead of tweaking the file directly for now.

[sidequestboy]

This was happening to me as well which was really confusing to say the least!!

Additionally, my understanding is that ~/.config/systemd/user is analagous to /etc/systemd/system in the sense that it is supposed to only contain user-created service files.

A better place to put the program-generated service file would be $XDG_DATA_HOME/systemd/user, defaulting to ~/.local/share/systemd/user

Refer to this unix/linux stack exchange post and man 5 systemd.unit

Like @wizonesolutions said, to work around this issue, you can use:

systemctl --user edit tmux

which creates the file ~/.config/systemd/user/tmux.service.d/override.conf

and for example change the ExecStart and ExecStop commands to look in your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME instead of ~/.tmux.conf and ~/.tmux/plugins:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tmux -f %E/tmux/tmux.conf new-session -d

ExecStop=
ExecStop=%E/tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect/scripts/save.sh
ExecStop=/usr/bin/tmux kill-server

which is all I was trying to do.