Running services without sudo

Question

I want to run a nodeJS web server on a couple of machines which I don't have sudo access on. What would be a good way to do this?

The two requirements are:

For 1., I've typically used nohup but is this a reasonable approach for production instances?

For 2., I can (hackily) add a crontab that starts the service, which will simply fail if it's already running. Is there a better way?

These servers are RHEL, but I'd prefer solutions that would also work for Ubuntu, if possible.

askubuntu.com/questions/173924/…
– Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com
Jul 29, 2017 at 9:58 — Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com, Jul 29, 2017 at 9:58

l0b0 · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-12 07:32:51Z

3

You could use @reboot as the crontab startup field to make relatively sure it hasn't already been started.

answered Jun 12, 2013 at 7:32

l0b0

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So reading between the lines, using crontab is not a bad way to run a service like this?
– Steve Bennett
Jun 12, 2013 at 8:40
@SteveBennett Some would say that a non-admin running a service is "bad". But inasmuch as doing so isn't bad in your case, cron isn't a bad way to run it.
– depquid
Jun 12, 2013 at 20:05
1

An admin running a service is much worse. If you have any cron jobs starting services as root, I hope you demote them to nobody or some other user...
– l0b0
Jun 12, 2013 at 20:13

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