LSB init scripts with a java daemon in Ubuntu

I have several java-based services that someone wanted to run as daemons. I would have preferred running them in Tomcat, but they didn't want to administer that. So I thought I would create an init script in /etc/init.d, and use that to stop/start the service and to check its status via service --status-all. If you follow the documentation on this the Debian people recommend using their init functions in /lib/lsb/init-functions. The ones I don't like are start-stop-daemon and the use of pid files in /var/run. Firstly, for a java service run as java -jar MyProg.jar ...options... & this doesn't fit into the mould of an executable daemon with arguments, since the program name is just "java" and the actual "daemon" is a long path name with even longer classpath variables etc. Also I don't see the point of the pid file. Its only purpose is to test if the daemon is running. But you can do that with:

PID=`ps aux | grep $DAEMON | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

That gives you the process ID so long as you have a long enough name for the daemon. So if $PID is empty the daemon is not running, and according to the standard I am supposed to call exit 3 or exit 0 if it was running. However service --status-all ignores this return code. Oh yes. After hours of hacking I found a script that did work because it called log_success_msg in each of the two cases (see below). And with that, it works. Presumably because this reads the script status code. Without those lines service --status-all reports that the service "isn't running" no matter what.

In the following sample code just replace my daemon, and all the paths etc with yours. The meat of the script is generic, although it doesn't support reload.

#!/bin/sh # # /etc/init.d/bhlpages -- startup script for the BHL pages service # # ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: bhlpages # Required-Start: mongodb $remote_fs $syslog # Required-Stop: mongodb $remote_fs $syslog # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6 # Short-Description: Start BHL Pages. # Description: Start the BHL page description service for TILT ### END INIT INFO # Exit if the package is not installed [ -e "/usr/local/bin/bhlpages/BHLPages.jar" ] || exit 5 PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin DESC="BHL page description service for TILT" NAME=bhlpages DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/bhlpages/BHLPages.jar # LibPath is a simple java program that prints the java runtime libpath # which is only needed so we can add our install location to it for JNI LIBPATH=`java -cp /usr/local/bin/bhlpages/ LibPath`:/usr/local/lib # Load the standard init functions . /lib/lsb/init-functions # make a classpath out of a directory of jars getjarpaths() { JARPATH="" for f in $1/*.jar do JARPATH="$JARPATH:$f" done echo $JARPATH return } do_start() { JARPATHS=`getjarpaths /usr/local/bin/bhlpages/lib` pkill -f $DAEMON java -Djava.library.path=$LIBPATH -cp .$JARPATHS:/usr/local/bin/bhlpages/BHLPages.jar bhl.pages.JettyServer -w 8084 >> /var/log/bhlpages.log 2>&1 & } do_stop() { pkill -f $DAEMON } ### main logic ### case "$1" in start) log_daemon_msg "Starting $NAME" do_start log_end_msg 0 ;; stop) PID=`ps aux | grep $DAEMON | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'` if [ -n $PID ]; then log_daemon_msg "Stopping $NAME" do_stop else log_daemon_msg "$NAME not running" fi log_end_msg 0 ;; restart) # Restart the daemon. $0 stop && sleep 2 && $0 start ;; status) PID=`ps aux | grep $DAEMON | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'` if [ -z $PID ]; then log_success_msg "$NAME is not running" exit 3 else log_success_msg "$NAME is running" exit 0 fi ;; *) log_action_msg "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" exit 1 ;; esac exit 0