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up vote 16 down vote favorite
8

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

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4  
How services start up is very conditional on the Linux distro. Please tell us what you are trying to accomplish (and on what distro and maybe Desktop Environment) , because right now I think you're probably not thinking about the problem right. –  xenoterracide♦ Sep 12 '10 at 14:24
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6 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

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!

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1  
Note that while start, stop, and restart are usually sufficient for simple init scripts. You probably also want to include a 'status' action, which is easy in Debian and other distros that include status_of_proc() in its init-functions package. Well managed packages will include all of the functions required by the LSB (refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/…). The init script distributed with tomcat in Ubuntu contains all of these actions, it is probably bet to just use that. –  Steven D Sep 12 '10 at 20:32
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up vote 12 down vote

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/you/tomcat --and --parameters

And you Tomcat should start on system start.

Systemd

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

  • put inside:

[Service]

ExecStart=/path/to/you/tomcat --and --parameters

Restart=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.

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up vote 5 down vote

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
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Does this apply to all startups, or just reboots? –  Hugo Sep 12 '10 at 18:34
 
It applies ONLY to fcron - not vixie-cron or any other cron AFAIK. –  Maciej Piechotka Sep 12 '10 at 20:04
 
@Maciej It definitely works for vixie-cron; that's what I use –  Michael Mrozek♦ Sep 12 '10 at 23:10
 
@Hugo All startups –  Michael Mrozek♦ Sep 12 '10 at 23:10
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up vote 5 down vote

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.

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up vote 4 down vote

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.

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up vote 1 down vote

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

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how to make my daemon appear in service --status-all list? –  neckTwi Jun 26 at 5:25
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