AdguardHome vs adguardhome

General Discussion
1

Hi,
It’s maybe a stupid question but when I install AGH via dietpi-software, the service adguardhome is installed running with adguardhome as user.
As such not an issue, but running the official CLI commands like AdGuardHome -s restart don’t work since running under adguardhome (which one can’t log in with)
One needs to ‘AdGuardHome -s install’ in order to exec the above.
There is also a difference in /etc/systemd/system files.
The dietpi adguardhome.service looks like this

[Unit]
Description=AdGuard Home (DietPi)
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=60
StartLimitBurst=5

[Service]
User=adguardhome
AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_NET_RAW
ExecStart=/mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome/AdGuardHome
ExecReload=/mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome/AdGuardHome -s reload
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

whereas the ‘standard’ AdguardHome.service

[Unit]
Description=AdGuard Home: Network-level blocker
ConditionFileIsExecutable=/mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome/AdGuardHome

After=syslog.target network-online.target

[Service]
StartLimitInterval=5
StartLimitBurst=10
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /var/log/
ExecStart=/mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome/AdGuardHome "-s" "run"

WorkingDirectory=/mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome



StandardOutput=file:/var/log/AdGuardHome.out
StandardError=file:/var/log/AdGuardHome.err

Restart=always

RestartSec=10
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/sysconfig/AdGuardHome

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

So my question is why the difference exists. Sure systemctl replaces the CLI commands, but my question is out of curiosity.
Cheers,
Eddy

2

We decided to run most of our applications as individual users and not with root user privileges. Let’s call it some kind of security layer and best practices. Running AdGuardHome -s install should have installed a concurrent service, which is started as root user, undermining the idea to have apps running with less privileges as possible.

root@DietPiR5S:~# ps -ef | grep home
adguard+     564       1  1 10:30 ?        00:00:03 /mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome/AdGuardHome
root         567       1  0 10:30 ?        00:00:01 /mnt/dietpi_userdata/adguardhome/AdGuardHome -s run
root        1056     987  0 10:35 pts/0    00:00:00 grep home
root@DietPiR5S:~#

Yes because executable is not located within path that is included within the env variable.

correct, use systemctl restart adguardhome if you like to restart the service

3

Thanks for the clear explanation