[[info:shepherd][The Shepherd manual]] suggests that you use a single =init.scm=, but as is pointed out by this article about [[https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/gnu-shepherd-user-services/][GNU Shepherd user services]] it might be better to have the services in separate files so you can restart them individually if you make any changes to them. So I just put a loading script into =init.scm= that goes through the =init.d= directory and loads each service defined in there.

#+begin_src scheme
  (use-modules (shepherd service)
               ((ice-9 ftw) #:select (scandir)))
#+end_src

I can't use ~(current-filename)~ here because this file will be symlinked into the =$XDG_CONFIG_DIR/shepherd/init.scm= and the =current-filename= function will return the actual path, not the path of the symbolic link.

#+begin_src scheme
  (define init-directory
    (string-append (getenv "XDG_CONFIG_HOME") "/shepherd/init.d"))
#+end_src

With that in place, we can loop over each =*.scm= file in the =init-directory= and load them.

#+begin_src scheme
  (for-each
   (λ (file) (load (string-append "init.d/" file)))
   (scandir init-directory
            (λ (file) (string-suffix? ".scm" file))))
#+end_src

Now turn shepherd into a daemon.

#+begin_src scheme
  (action 'shepherd 'daemonize)
#+end_src