website/site/content/posts/sysduser.md

+++ title = "How to use the Systemd userspace DBus API on Traivis-CI" author = ["Valentin Boettcher"] date = 2020-07-11T14:00:00-04:00 tags = ["DBUS", "CI"] categories = ["Tricks"] draft = false +++

I am currently working on a project which involves talking to the systemd userspace session via the session dbus instance.

After some fiddling around and enabling debug mode on travis via the excellent user support, I came up with the following.

Travis uses VMs that run ubuntu which comes with systemd. To enable the userspace dbus session, one has to install the dbus-user-session package. After the installation, it has to be activated through systemctl --user start dbus. Furthermore one has to set the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable through export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/$(id -u)/bus.

TL;DR

script:
  - sudo apt update
  - sudo apt install dbus-user-session
  - systemctl --user start dbus
  - export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/$(id -u)/bus