This article demonstrates how to fix the error “System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can’t operate. Failed to connect to bus: Host is down” when using WSL version 2.

The error message

This example is done using WSL 2 with a Linux-based application.

The below error message is displayed:

System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.
Failed to connect to bus: Host is down

How to fix it

To fix, operate the service using /etc/init.d/ instead:

sudo /etc/init.d/<service> <operation>

Where the operation is start, status, stop, restart, etc and service is the service you need to operate.

For example, to start postgresql, this command looks like:

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

Why this error occurs

At the time of this article, WSL 2 does not support the systemd command. To work around this, /etc/init.d is used.

Example

The below screen capture displays running into the error when attempting to enable the postgresql service.

The below screen capture displays a workaround to start postgresql using /etc/init.d instead.

The below screen capture displays that the service was successfully started via the status operation.