I have deployment (capistrano) that, on success, reloads systemd:

sudo systemd reload myserver.service

But, just after the first deploy, the service is not yet running. In that case, I want to start it, instead.

sudo systemd start myserver.service

Is there a flag or other trick in systemd that figures out: "is the service running, then reload, otherwise, start it"? The alternative would be to build this into the deployment tooling itself, but I'd rather use existing features if systemd provides these.

I have deployment (capistrano) that, on success, reloads systemd:

sudo systemctl reload myserver.service

But, just after the first deploy, the service is not yet running. In that case, I want to start it, instead.

sudo systemctl start myserver.service

Is there a flag or other trick in systemd that figures out: "is the service running, then reload, otherwise, start it"? The alternative would be to build this into the deployment tooling itself, but I'd rather use existing features if systemd provides these.