Support for Services (daemons)

[phreed]

Like #1894 this enhancement has to do with integration with a specific family of operating-systems, specifically those which use systemd at the init service.

https://discord.com/channels/1082332781146800168/1359211739798962336/1360270879077957662

We recently saw your own extension to pixi global for covering services! Exciting 🙂 We just extended pixi-global to cover two additional things: shell completion scripts and menu items. I think it could be interesting to add additional special files to packages that pixi can take care of, e.g. to install services. pixi global could handle files under $PREFIX/etc/systemd/service.file and install them as a post-processing step, as an idea.

The plan is to finish a version v0.1 of the systemd-pixi-generator which pulls all of the meta-data from the pixi global manifest. This would make it possible for me use a fairly simple script to install pixi, the systemd-pixi-generator , and a copy of the pixi global manifest and then load and configure and start all of the services on that device with just a pixi global sync.
In fact, if there were a pixi package already installed containing both systemd-pixi-generator and pixi.
Then all that would be required would be to install the pixi global manifest and pixi global sync.

This v0.1 version would provide the desired functionality and be useful in collecting feedback.
The goal for version 1.0 would be to pull structured information from the individual packages.
This structured information would include metadata and content.

The obvious approach is to have pixi install the service files in a post-processing step.
A set of pixi and platform specific service generators might be a better approach.

The approach should generalize to (at least) the following situations:

systemd (most linux)

The systemd-pixi-generator is a systemd code generator suitable for use with pixi.
Something akin to the podman quadlet.

launchd (MacOS)

Via a launch daemon designed to generate other plist files and load them with launchctl bootstrap or launchctl load.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/CreatingLaunchdJobs.html

Windows Service Control Manager (SCM)

The SCM does not provide a specification for service generation, but they do provide indirect mechanisms.
I think this may be possible via sc.exe or maybe a powershell (using New-Service) script (not sure).

[phreed]

Motivating Examples

nginix : https://github.com/conda-forge/nginx-feedstock
solr : https://github.com/conda-forge/apache-solr-feedstock
mysql : https://github.com/conda-forge/mysql-feedstock
mongo : https://github.com/conda-forge/mongodb-feedstock
redis : https://github.com/conda-forge/redis-py-feedstock

Consider the node-red service.
This service has a separate project for linux installation.