What are user system services?

A user system service is a long-lived process that TurboStack runs for you under your own system user, managed by systemd (the Linux service manager). It starts on its own, restarts if it crashes, and can keep running after you log out - without any root access.

Many applications need a process that stays running in the background: a message-queue consumer, a queue worker, a scheduled-job runner, or the application server itself. If that process stops, work stops piling up or the site returns a 502 error. A user system service keeps it running and restarts it automatically.

How it works on TurboStack

• Each service is described by a unit file under ~/.config/systemd/user/, where ~ is your system user's home directory (for example /var/www/prod/).
• You manage services with systemctl --user over Secure Shell (SSH). No root access is needed, because the services run as your system user.
• Logs go to the systemd journal, which you read with journalctl --user.
• loginctl enable-linger lets your services keep running after you close your SSH session and start again after a reboot.

For the exact commands to create, start, stop and inspect a service, see How to manage user system services.

Which applications use them

Background processing differs per application. These are the common cases on TurboStack:

Application	What runs as a user service
Magento	Message-queue consumers (indexing, emails, order processing)
Shopware	Message-queue consumers and the scheduled-task runner
Odoo	The Odoo application server itself
Akeneo	Job-queue consumers (imports, exports, maintenance)
Laravel	Queue workers
Craft CMS	The queue listener
OroCommerce	Message-queue consumers
Medusa	The Node.js application process (or run it under pm2)
nopCommerce	The .NET application service

Related

• How to manage user system services
• SSH access
• Application file layout and permissions
• How to keep a Node.js app running