Software updates by Troy D. Hanson

upstart: init in Ubuntu

Here’s an example of software just working well: I went to write a “startup script” for my process (you know, one of those init.d startup scripts that gets your process going when the box is rebooted). I learned that, on Ubuntu, the init process has been replaced with the very friendly “upstart” package.

Here’s how a startup script looks. This is for the acpid daemon:

# acpid - ACPI daemon
#
# The ACPI daemon provides a socket for other daemons to multiplex kernel
# ACPI events from, and a framework for reacting to those events.

description   "ACPI daemon"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

expect fork
respawn

exec acpid -c /etc/acpi/events -s /var/run/acpid.socket

I copied this file (renaming it for my own process and adjusting the exec line), put the file in /etc/init/pm.conf and voilà– my work was done. I just had to start up the process manually the first time using,

service pm start

A few pointers:

• If you want to see the upstart logs, look in /var/log/daemon.log.
• upstart itself is documented in init(8) (man -s 8 init)
• the conf file syntax is documented in init(5) (man -s 5 init)

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