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What can I do to prevent that a service starts on install?

When installing zerotier-one manually, i.e. using

apt install zerotier-one

it is both enabled (equivalent of systemctl enable zerotier-one) and started (equivalent of systemctl start zerotier-one) automatically. Is there some way of preventing this behviour?

Looking at the control file in the .deb the package is built using dh_systemd_enable to enable it, and dh_installinit to start it. Neither of the manpages for these two pieces of debhelper mention anything about how to prevent enable/start though.

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For a one off installation, you can prevent a service from being started by masking it beforehand:

sudo systemctl mask zerotier-one

(See this recent debian-devel thread on “not starting a daemon upon installation” for related discussion, including the paucity of documentation in a Debian-specific context.)

To define a more comprehensive policy, you can use systemd presets, which are designed explicitly for this; for a single service you could create a preset containing only

disable zerotier-one.service
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    The proper systemd way is of course presets, not masks, with the maintainer scripts using systemctl preset instead of systemctl enable. Last that I checked, this was rarely used by Debian packages and did not really work in Debian if one used debhelper. unix.stackexchange.com/a/462321/5132 Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 12:48
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    @JdeBP indeed, presets are another option, I’ll update my answer. They are supported in Debian, via deb-systemd-helper, see #772555 for details. Commented Jun 12, 2020 at 13:13

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