unitd(8)

📦

version 1.36.1 · 2 versions

1.36.1 · alpine 3.24 (latest)
1.35.0 · nixos 26.05

💅 unitd — bestie, this is the NGINX Unit daemon

okay so real talk, this page is from the System Manager's Manual and it's all about unitd(8) — the thing that actually runs NGINX Unit for you 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

unitd [--no-daemon] [--control socket] [--control-mode mode]
      [--control-user user] [--control-group group] [--group name]
      [--user name] [--log file] [--modulesdir directory] [--pid file]
      [--statedir directory]
unitd [-h | --help | --version]

two whole invocation forms, no cap. first one is the "run it for real" lineup, second one is the "just tell me stuff" lineup 🎀

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so NGINX Unit is a polyglot app server, a reverse proxy, and a static file server for UNIX-like systems. like, all three, at once, main character energy honestly 👑

and get this — it was built by nginx(8) team members from scratch to be super efficient and fully configurable at runtime. from SCRATCH. iconic behavior fr fr ✨

💖 OPTIONS 💖

-h, --help — shows you a summary of Unit's command-line options plus their compile-time defaults. cute little cheat sheet moment 📋
--version — displays Unit's version and the ./configure settings it was built with. like a birth certificate but for your binary 🍼
--no-daemon — runs Unit in non-daemon mode. no backgrounding, she stays right there with you 🫶
--control socket — overrides the control API's socket address. takes it in IPv4, IPv6, or UNIX-domain format, so pick your fighter 💅
--control-mode mode — sets the permission of the UNIX-domain control socket 🔐
--control-user user — sets the owner of the UNIX-domain control socket 👤
--control-group group — sets the group of the UNIX-domain control socket 👥

so here's the tea on the UNIX-domain control socket ☕ on platforms that provide peer credentials (Linux and the BSDs), the control API additionally requires that the connecting peer's effective user ID be either 0 (root) or the user ID unitd runs as. any other local users? rejected before the request is even read 💀

on those builds, the --control-user, --control-group, and --control-mode permissions act as defense-in-depth rather than the sole access control. but where peer credentials are unavailable — or for an IP-based control socket — those socket permissions (or plain old network reachability) remain the boundary. iykyk 🌈

--group name, --user name — override the group name and user name used to run Unit's non-privileged processes 🧚
--log file — overrides the pathname for Unit's log 📓
--modulesdir directory — overrides the directory path for Unit's language modules (*.unit.so) files. yes, exactly that glob, don't @ me 🧩
--pid file — overrides the pathname for the PID file of Unit's main process 🔢
--statedir directory — overrides the directory path for Unit's state storage 🗄️

🎀 EXIT STATUS 🎀

exit status is 0 on success 🎉
or 1 if the daemon encounters an error 😭

that's it. binary. no in-between, she's not ambiguous 💀

🌸 FILES 🌸

/run/unit.pid — the PID file of Unit's main process 🔖
/var/log/unit.log — a general-purpose log for diagnostics and troubleshooting. when things go sideways, this is your bestie 🩺

🍓 SOCKETS 🍓

unix:/run/control.unit.sock — the socket address of Unit's control API. that's the doorway to telling her what to do 🔌

👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

okay this is the whole squad, everyone say thank you 🙏

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 — open source, slay 📜✨

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

Website: https://unit.nginx.org
User mailing list: https://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/unit
GitHub: https://github.com/nginx/unit

go click around, she's got lore 💜

and that's the page bestie 🫶 this whole thing came to you from NGINX Unit, dated 2023-04-26, sitting pretty at unitd(8) — now go start a daemon, you got this 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from

alpine 3.24: freeunit-doc 1.36.1-r0 · Apache-2.0
(C) 2017-2025 NGINX, Inc
(C) 2017-2025 Andrei Zeliankou
(C) 2018-2025 Konstantin Pavlov
(C) 2021-2025 Zhidao Hong
(C) 2022-2025 Andrew Clayton
(C) 2022-2025 Liam Crilly
(C) 2023-2025 Dan Callahan
(C) 2023-2025 Igor Ippolitov
(C) 2024-2025 Ava Hahn
(C) 2023-2024 Danielle De Leo
(C) 2023-2024 Dylan Arbour
(C) 2023-2024 Gabor Javorszky
💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on 2026-11-04: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms