---
name: "avahi.service"
section: "5"
platform: "linux"
package: "avahi"
version: "1:0.9rc5-2"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/avahi.service"
---

# avahi.service(5)

avahi-daemon static service file

## NAME

avahi.service - avahi-daemon static service file

## SYNOPSIS

**/etc/avahi/services/\*.service**

## DESCRIPTION

*/etc/avahi/services/\*.service* are XML fragments containing static DNS-SD service data. Every service file can contain multiple service definitions which share the same name. This is useful for publishing service data for services which implement multiple protocols. (i.e. a printer implementing \_ipp.\_tcp and \_printer.\_tcp)

## XML TAGS

- **\<service-group\>** The document tag of avahi service files. Should contain one **\<name\>** and one or more **\<service\>** elements.

  - **\<name replace-wildcards="yes\|no"\>** The service name. If **replace-wildcards** is "yes", any occurrence of the string "%h" will be replaced by the local host name. This can be used for service names like "Remote Terminal on %h". If **replace-wildcards** is not specified, defaults to "no".

  - **\<service protocol="ipv4\|ipv6\|any"\>** Contains the service information for exactly one service type. Should contain one **\<type\>** and one **\<port\>** element. Optionally it may contain one **\<domain-name\>**, one **\<host-name\>**, any number of **\<subtype\>** and any number of **\<txt-record\>** elements. The attribute **protocol** specifies the protocol to advertise the service on. If **any** is used (which is the default), the service will be advertised on both IPv4 and IPv6.

  - **\<type\>** Contains the DNS-SD service type for this service. e.g. "\_http.\_tcp".

  - **\<subtype\>** Contains an additional DNS-SD service subtype for this service. e.g. "\_anon.\_sub.\_ftp.\_tcp".

  - **\<domain-name\>** The domain name this service should be registered. If omitted defaults to the default domain of the avahi daemon. (probably .local)

  - **\<host-name\>** The host name of the host that provides this service. This should be a host that is resolvable by multicast or unicast DNS. Please note that you need to specify a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) here, i.e. .local is not appended implicitly! The host name doesn't need to be part of the domain specified in **\<domain-name\>**. See **[avahi.hosts(5)](/avahi.hosts/5.md)** for more information how to publish additional host name mappings.

  - **\<port\>** The IP port number the service listens on.

  - **\<txt-record value-format="text\|binary-hex\|binary-base64"\>** DNS-SD TXT record data. If **value-format** is "text", the value of the TXT record is taken verbatim. If **value-format** is "binary-hex" then the value of TXT record is decoded by taking pairs of characters after the "=" char and interpreting them as the textual representation of the two-digit hexadecimal number. Both uppercase and lowercase hexadecimal digits are allowed. The 0x or 0X prefix is not allowed. This requires the length of the value to be even. If **value-format** is "binary-base64" then the value of TXT record is decoded with a base64 decoder. The character set used is A-Za-z0-9+/. This requires the length of the value to be a multiple of 4, with "=" as padding at the end. If **value-format** is not specified, defaults to "text". Examples (all the values are decoded to the string "value" without quotes):

  \<txt-record\>key=value\</txt-record\>

  \<txt-record value-format="text"\>key=value\</txt-record\>

  \<txt-record value-format="binary-hex"\>key=76616c7565\</txt-record\>

  \<txt-record value-format="binary-base64"\>key=dmFsdWU=\</txt-record\>

## AUTHORS

The Avahi Developers \<avahi (at) lists (dot) freedesktop (dot) org\>; Avahi is available from **http://avahi.org/**

## SEE ALSO

**[avahi-daemon(8)](/avahi-daemon/8.md)**, **[avahi.hosts(5)](/avahi.hosts/5.md)**

## COMMENTS

This man page was written using **xml2man(1)** by Oliver Kurth.