Start tomcat at startup with administrative privileges

Question

I need one process run before log in to system. How to run it like services? how do I make services in Linux?

In Ubuntu and Fedora? The service is customized tomcat

Answer 1

To run a service without or before logging in to the system (i.e. "on boot"), you will need to create a startup script and add it to the boot sequence.
There's three parts to a service script: start, stop and restart.
The basic structure of a service script is:

#!/bin/bash
#
RETVAL=0;

start() {
echo “Starting <Service>”
}

stop() {
echo “Stopping <Service>”
}

restart() {
stop
start
}

case “$1″ in
start)
  start
;;
stop)
  stop
;;
restart)
  restart
;;
*)

echo $”Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}”
exit 1
esac

exit $RETVAL  

Once you have tweaked the script to your liking, just place it in /etc/init.d/
And, add it to the system service startup process (on Fedora, I am not a Ubuntu user, >D):

chkconfig -add <ServiceName>  

Service will be added to the system boot up process and you will not have to manually start it up again.

Cheers!

Answer 2

Depending on init system, you create init script differently. Fedora gives you upstart and systemd to choose from, and of course SysV compatibility.

Upstart

• create service definition file as /etc/init/custom-tomcat.conf

• put inside:

  start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=3
  respawn
  exec /path/to/your/tomcat --and --parameters
  

And your Tomcat should start on system start.

Systemd

• create service definition in /etc/systemd/system/custom-tomcat.service

• put inside:

  [Service]
  ExecStart=/path/to/your/tomcat --and --parameters
  Restart=always
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target
  

and enable your service using systemctl enable custom-tomcat.service. It will be started every normal boot.

Of course there are few more configuration options for both init systems, you can check those in their documentation.

Answer 3

Tomcat is a fairly common service, I'd recommend looking at the init script provided by the distro already. Chances are it works with your customized binary, with little to no tweaking.

Answer 4

If you have a cron daemon, one of the predefined cron time hooks is @reboot, which naturally runs when the system starts. Run crontab -e to edit your crontab file, and add a line:

@reboot /your/command/here

Answer 5

For simply running a script after the computer started but before a user logs in, you can simply edit the script /etc/rc.local which is meant to solve exactly this task.

Answer 6

You can make a more sophisticated script, which allows you to run under a specific user's permissions, as follows:

#!/bin/sh
NAME=myservice
DESC="My Service"
USERGROUP="myservice:myservice"

#Helper functions
start() {
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --background --make-pidfile \
                --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid --chuid $USERGROUP \
                --exec /usr/local/bin/myservice
}

stop() {
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec myservice --retry 30
}

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
        start
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
        stop
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  restart)
        echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
        #set +e
        stop
        #set -e
        #sleep 1
        start

        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  *)
        N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

The script goes in /etc/init.d/myservice, and you start the service by executing:

/etc/init.d/myservice start

Read the man page on start-stop-daemon to understand how it works.

Answer 7

In Ubuntu or Debian like you can use, to add

update-rc.d your_service defaults

to remove

update-rc.d -f your_service remove

Bye! \o

is nice to implements the functions status and force-reload to be LSB-compilant