SYSTEMD-TI...D.SERVICE(8)

✨ NAME ✨

systemd-timedated.service, systemd-timedated — the time and date bus mechanism, bestie 💖

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

systemd-timedated.service

/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-timedated

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Okay so systemd-timedated.service is a system service, right? And it's literally the mechanism for changing the system clock and the timezone, plus enabling or disabling network time synchronization. That's its whole thing. 💅

And the way it works is so iconic: systemd-timedated gets automatically activated on request, and then it terminates itself when nobody's using it anymore. Self-care queen behavior honestly. 🦋

The tool timedatectl(1) is a command line client to this service — it's how you actually talk to it.

Right now systemd-timedated offers access to these four settings, no more no less:

• The system time ⏰
• The system timezone 🌍
• A boolean controlling whether the system RTC is in local or UTC timezone
• Whether the time synchronization service is enabled/started or disabled/stopped — see the next section for that one 👀

If you wanna know about the D-Bus API, go look at org.freedesktop.timedate1(5) and org.freedesktop.LogControl1(5). That's where the lore is. 📚

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🔥 LIST OF NETWORK TIME SYNCHRONIZATION SERVICES 🔥

So here's how systemd-timedated finds its NTP services. It goes looking for files with a .list extension in ntp-units.d/ directories. Each file gets parsed as a list of unit names, one per line. Empty lines and lines with comments ("#") are ignored — like, they just don't count. 🙈

Files get read from /usr/lib/systemd/ntp-units.d/ and the corresponding directories under /etc/, /run/, /usr/local/lib/.

The override hierarchy is giving priority drama, so listen up:

• Files in /etc/ override files with the same name in /run/, /usr/local/lib/, and /usr/lib/.
• Files in /run/ override files with the same name under /usr/.

And packages should install their configuration files in /usr/lib/ (that's for distribution packages) or /usr/local/lib/ (that's for local installs). Periodt. 💅

⭐ Example 1. ntp-units.d/ entry for systemd-timesyncd

# /usr/lib/systemd/ntp-units.d/80-systemd-timesync.list
systemd-timesyncd.service

Now, if the environment variable $SYSTEMD_TIMEDATED_NTP_SERVICES is set, systemd-timedated will parse the contents of that variable as a colon-separated list of unit names. And when it's set, this variable overrides the file-based list described above. It said what it said. 👑

⭐ Example 2. An override that specifies that chronyd should be used if available

SYSTEMD_TIMEDATED_NTP_SERVICES=chronyd.service:systemd-timesyncd.service

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

systemd(1), timedatectl(1), localtime(5), hwclock(8), systemd-timesyncd(8), org.freedesktop.timedate1(5)

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That's the whole page bestie, no cap — brought to you by systemd 262.1 ✨ thanks for reading my little SYSTEMD-TI...D.SERVICE(8) essay, mwah 🫶💖