How to set up a systemd service to retry 5 times on a cycle of 30 seconds

Question

I want systemd to start a script and retry a maximum of 5 times, 30s apart. Reading the systemd.service manual and searching the Internet didn\'t produce any obvious answers.

Answer 1

After much trial and error I solved my problem and thought it worth posting here...

To allow a maximum of 5 retries separated by 30 seconds use the following options in the relevant systemd service file.

[Unit]
StartLimitInterval=200
StartLimitBurst=5
[Service]
Restart=always
RestartSec=30

This worked for me for a service that runs a script using 'Type=idle'. Note that 'StartLimitInterval' must be greater than 'RestartSec * StartLimitBurst' otherwise the service will be restarted indefinitely.