Starting from tty. Hyprland runs fine, but I am not at systemd graphical-session.target

[sitedyno]

This means desktop-portal-hyprland doesn't auto start. I'm on arch & up to date, how can I become graphical?

[MahouShoujoMivutilde]

Depends on how complex you want to get.

There is hyprland-systemd.desktop with hyprland-session.service in examples.

I don't see why it wouldn't work, though if you e.g. change your PATH somewhere in your shell's ~/.profile without updating systemd environment after (systemctl --user import-environment PATH ...; dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd PATH ...), hyprland (as it runs as a systemd service here), won't see a new PATH, and your bindings that call custom scripts e.g. in ~/.local/bin won't work.

You don't have to run hyprland as a service though.

In the simplest case you want some .target (but as we can see above apparently .service works too) that has

# ~/.config/systemd/user/hyprland-session.target
[Unit]
# ...
BindsTo=graphical-session.target
# ...

to be launched when hyprland is ready (WAYLAND_DISPLAY etc is set, systemd / dbus environment is updated, so all your waybars won't crash on launch).

(you can't start graphical-session.target directly)

e.g.

exec-once = sleep 5s && systemctl --user start hyprland-session.target

(sleep is for variables to be updated)

And

exec-shutdown = systemctl --user stop hyprland-session.target

so that all units with PartOf=graphical-session.target will stop. See man systemd.special.

That's the gist of it.

In practice, you might not want this delay, and would prefer to update variables yourself (or with some other script).

For that there is uwsm, which does, seemingly, everything, but is huge (haven't tried it). Or you could look at how sway-systemd's session.sh and units do it, and adapt for hyprland, which is what I did.

Basically

1. change names of units (duh)
2. split session.sh in two scripts:
   2.1. one that sets the variables and starts the session (cleaning up if failed / terminated) - to be launched with exec-once
   2.2. and the other one that just cleans up - to be launched with exec-shutdown

Also, might be of interest: HYPRLAND_NO_SD_VARS=1 wiki.

[sitedyno]

Thank you! I'll use the session service from examples for now, and start w/ systemctl --user start --wait hyprland-session.service from the tty. Working so far.