I am building a launchctl service which can run a java service. I am able to create launchctl service with root user and test start/stop/status/automatic start at reboot use cases.

I am struggling with running same launchctl service with non root user(ec2-user in my case)

My plist file looks like below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>siem</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>java</string>
    <string>-jar</string>
    <string>/Users/ec2-user/siem.jar</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/> <!-- run the program at login -->
  <key>KeepAlive</key>
  <true/> <!-- run the program again if it terminates -->
  <key>WorkingDirectory</key>
  <string>/Users/ec2-user</string>
   <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
   <string>/tmp/mycommand.err</string>
   <key>StandardOutPath</key>
   <string>/tmp/mycommand.out</string>
</dict>
</plist>

I have tried various steps to run the above service with ec2-user. UID for ec2-user is 501.

ec2-user@ip-172-31-30-212 ~ % launchctl bootstrap gui/501 ~/Library/LaunchDaemons/siem.plist
Bootstrap failed: 125: Unknown error: 125

Verified the content of plist file

ec2-user@ip-172-31-30-212 ~ % plutil ~/Library/LaunchDaemons/siem.plist
/Users/ec2-user/Library/LaunchDaemons/siem.plist: OK

Tried bootstraping service with user

ec2-user@ip-172-31-30-212 ~ % launchctl bootstrap user/501 ~/Library/LaunchDaemons/siem.plist
Bootstrap failed: 5: Input/output error

All of the above errors are not verbose and doesn’t seem to find any way.

My goal : I want to run launchctl service with non root user.

Environment Details:

OS : macOS on AWS EC2 Instance

macOS Version : BigSur and Monterey

Update 1:

Checked system logs

Nov 26 17:51:23 ip-172-31-30-212 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (siem[2159]): Service could not initialize: 20G224: xpcproxy + 23787 [839][86D1F823-583D-36B7-A047-55971A034143]: 0xd
Nov 26 17:51:23 ip-172-31-30-212 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (siem.label[2160]): Service could not initialize: 20G224: xpcproxy + 23787 [839][86D1F823-583D-36B7-A047-55971A034143]: 0xd
Nov 26 17:51:23 ip-172-31-30-212 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (siem[2159]): Service exited with abnormal code: 78
Nov 26 17:51:23 ip-172-31-30-212 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (siem): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Nov 26 17:51:23 ip-172-31-30-212 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (siem.label[2160]): Service exited with abnormal code: 78
Nov 26 17:51:23 ip-172-31-30-212 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (siem.label): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.