Systemd service for autossh

autossh.service

[Unit]
Description=Keeps a tunnel to 'remote.example.com' open
After=network.target

[Service]
User=autossh
# -p [PORT]
# -l [user]
# -M 0 --> no monitoring
# -N Just open the connection and do nothing (not interactive)
# LOCALPORT:IP_ON_EXAMPLE_COM:PORT_ON_EXAMPLE_COM
ExecStart=/usr/bin/autossh -M 0 -N -q -o "ServerAliveInterval 60" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -p 22 -l autossh remote.example.com -L 7474:127.0.0.1:7474 -i /home/autossh/.ssh/id_rsa

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

For completeness, you should also add:

ExecStop=kill -9 autossh

Without it systemctl stop autossh won't do anything.

I think it would be better idea to add

KillMode=control-group

to the .service file because that will kill everything that was started (recursively) and nothing more. In addition, it will first send SIGTERM and use SIGKILL only if the process will not stop nicely.

If you randomly kill one or all autossh processes in the system, you might kill more than expected if autossh is used for other stuff, too.

See https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.kill.html#KillMode= for details