Daemon exits on runners without systemd when the client is preinstalled: /run/twingate is never created #101

On a runner without systemd, twingate setup --headless succeeds, then every twingate start prints Failed to start twingated. Status stays not-running, the retry loop runs out of attempts, and the step fails with Twingate service failed to connect. The daemon writes nothing to /var/log/twingated.log.

Environment

Cause

Without systemd, twingate start runs twingate-classic service-start, which forks the daemon. The daemon tries to create its pid file, gets ENOENT because /run/twingate does not exist, and exits with code 1 before logging anything. strace -f on twingate start:

1734  openat(AT_FDCWD, "/run/twingate/twingated.pid", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_CLOEXEC, 0666) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
1734  write(12, "\0\0\0\2NOEX", 8) = 8
1734  exit_group(1) = ?

On a systemd host, RuntimeDirectory=twingate in twingate.service creates /run/twingate. On this runner nothing else creates it: there is no tmpfiles.d entry, and the package postinst only creates /var/lib/twingate.

Why it started now

The runner image used to ship an older client (2026.160), which the action upgraded during the job, and the job connected. Since the image ships 2026.239.6882, the action finds the latest version already installed and installs nothing. We assume the in-job upgrade used to create /run/twingate as a side effect, but we have not checked the package contents.

Workaround

Creating the directory before the action brings the client online on the first attempt:

- run: sudo mkdir -p /run/twingate
- uses: twingate/github-action@v1
  with:
    service-key: ${{ secrets.TWINGATE_SERVICE_KEY }}

Suggested fix

When the daemon starts without systemd, the client could create its runtime directory (mode 0755, as RuntimeDirectoryMode does) before it forks. Until then, the action could run $SUDO mkdir -p /run/twingate before twingate start on Linux. It already has a separate path for runners without systemd when it reads logs.