systemd apparently not finding .service file

Question

I've put together a foo.service file for our foo service that runs as a daemon. The service runs fine when I run systemctl start foo (and stop) but systemtcl enable foo results in Failed to issue method call: Invalid argument. The unit file is placed in /etc/systemd/system/foo.service, and has permissions 0755. Setting systemd to debug and running enable gives

Looking for unit files in (highest priority first):`     /etc/systemd/system     /run/systemd/system     /usr/local/lib/systemd/system     /usr/lib/systemd/system Looking for SysV init scripts in:     /etc/rc.d/init.d Looking for SysV rcN.d links in:     /etc/rd.c Failed to issue method call: Invalid argument 

Googling around, it seems like systemctl isn't finding the .service file. Is there any way to verify that? If so, how can I fix that? Any other ideas about what might be wrong? Is there more debugging I can enable? The debug info given doesn't really help me narrow down the problem.

foo.service looks like:

[Unit] Description=Blah Blah Blah  [Service] ExecStart=/usr/bar/doof/foo Type=simple PIDFile=/var/run/foo.pid  [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target,graphical.target 

EDIT: Yes, I did run systemctl daemon-reload.

Answer 1

For people from Google:

• Validate with sudo systemd-analyze verify NAME.service
• When using a symlink, make sure it uses absolute path
• Make sure the name is like /etc/systemd/system/*.service
• Do sudo systemctl daemon-reload after changes