Cannot open config file - LMS only able to run in sudo

[DawnVespero]

First off, I'm running LMS using the AUR package on Manjaro Linux. After installation, I enabled and started LMS through systemctl. I immediately noticed that the server wasn't running, so I ran systemctl status lms:

× lms.service - Lightweight Music Server
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/lms.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Tue 2025-10-28 09:33:27 CET; 6min ago
   Duration: 6ms
 Invocation: 7403ac31cd4c46608cc4b5868447ba8e
    Process: 1218 ExecStart=/usr/bin/lms (code=exited, status=200/CHDIR)
   Main PID: 1218 (code=exited, status=200/CHDIR)

Okt 28 09:33:27 vesperoHomeBrick systemd[1]: lms.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Okt 28 09:33:27 vesperoHomeBrick systemd[1]: lms.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Okt 28 09:33:27 vesperoHomeBrick systemd[1]: lms.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Okt 28 09:33:27 vesperoHomeBrick systemd[1]: Failed to start Lightweight Music Server.

I then tried to manually start lms through the binary, which gave me the following error:

❯ /usr/bin/lms
Caught std::exception: Cannot open config file '/etc/lms.conf'

Since then, I've tried everything I could to fix this issue: The config file does exist, so I ran chown and chmod on it to give full access to the lms user (which does also appear to have been set up correctly), but nothing worked. I can still run LMS just fine by executing the binary as sudo, so I'm pretty sure this is a permissions issue, but I can't for the life of me get it to trigger through systemctl or as a regular user.

[epoupon]

Hello!
Maybe you hit another error, which is about rights to create the /var/lms directory?
This is strange you don't see errors in sysctl journal, they are supposed to be output on stderr

[DawnVespero]

Alright, I tried manually creating the /var/lms directory as sudo (which had, in fact, not been created) and made sure to chown and chmod it as before to give the lms user access. Unfortunately, the situation is largely the same: Both systemctl and the lms still throw errors like before. I did notice though in the systemctl output that the error code is now different (as seen in the Process and Main PID rows):

❯ systemctl status lms
× lms.service - Lightweight Music Server
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/lms.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2025-10-31 14:10:13 CET; 44min ago
   Duration: 102ms
 Invocation: 32647e26bda148f99097139bd92a11b2
    Process: 1328 ExecStart=/usr/bin/lms (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
   Main PID: 1328 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

[DawnVespero]

A small update: Due to a recent system update that broke my LMS install, I reinstalled it, this time by compiling from source. This has fixed some issues: I can now execute the lms binary without sudo and it runs just fine. This might be due to the fact that the AUR package seems to be quite outdated (version 3.69 as of writing)

However, it still does not work through the systemd service. systemctl status lms returns the same result as seen in my last comment.

[epoupon]

Do you have debug-level logs from when the service fails to run?

[DawnVespero]

It doesn't seem to output any. I changed the config to write a debug-level log file, and it does write to it when I run LMS through the binary, but when systemctl fails to start it, the log file remains blank.