Error Running Neo4j with Systemd on Arch Linux - neo4j

Question

I've got neo4j installed on my arch linux setup, and am able to start the server manually (sudo neo4j start). However, when I try to start it using systemctl start neo4j, I get
Job for neo4j.service failed. See 'systemctl status neo4j.service' and
'journalctl -xn' for details.
Neither of the suggestions in the error message give anything helpful. I have /usr/lib/systemd/system/neo4j.service:
[Unit]
Description=Neo4j
[Service]
User=root
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/neo4j start
ExecStop=/usr/bin/neo4j stop
PIDFile=/run/neo4j/neo4j-service.pid
#LimitNOFILE=40000
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I've tried changing the User between neo4j and root, and I originally had LimitNOFILE not commented out, before I tried setting the limits in security/limits.conf (which got rid of the file number error when starting it normally). This setup is mentioned in the AUR, but I just can't get it working. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I have just attempted to set up Neo4j on a fresh Arch VM and this has worked successfully. The steps I followed were:
Boot
Install wget and jdk7-openjdk by running pacman -S wget jdk7-openjdk
Download Neo4j package from the AUR using wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ne/neo4j/neo4j.tar.gz
Unzip package with tar xvf neo4j.tar.gz
Change dir cd neo4j
Build package using makepkg (this downloads Neo4j from dist.neo4j.org)
Install with pacman -U neo4j-2.1.5-1-any.pkg.tar.gz
As per the messages received during installation, create configuration to point at the installed JDK:
mkdir /etc/systemd/system/neo4j.service.d
echo "[Service]" >> /etc/systemd/system/neo4j.service.d/java_home.conf
echo "Environment=JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default" >> /etc/systemd/system/neo4j.service.d/java_home.conf
Start the server with systemctl start neo4j.service
Check the server is running with curl http://localhost:7474/db/data/
If this works, a JSON response will be shown.
As I can't tell exactly the steps you went through to install or what your file system may look like, your best bet will probably be to compare the steps you went through with these above and see where the differences are.
At a guess, I'd recommend looking at your Java installation first to see if the service is having trouble finding the Java runtime. This is certainly the most fiddly part of the whole process.
Note: I used the JDK here but I don't see why the jre7-openjdk package should not work just as well.

Answer 2

Do you try to add this modified line for file /usr/lib/systemd/system/neo4j.service ?
[Unit]
Description=Neo4j
[Service]
User=neo4j
Type=forking
RuntimeDirectory=neo4j
RuntimeDirectoryMode=770
ExecStart=/usr/bin/neo4j start
ExecStop=/usr/bin/neo4j stop
ExecReload=/usr/bin/neo4j restart
RemainAfterExit=no
Restart=on-failure
PIDFile=/run/neo4j/neo4j-service.pid
LimitNOFILE=60000
TimeoutSec=600
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target