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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T00:31:03+00:00

I have an application that runs in a user account (Plack-based) and want an

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I have an application that runs in a user account (Plack-based) and want an init script.

It seems as easy as “sudo $user start_server …”. I just wrote an LSB script using start-stop-daemon and it is really clumsy and verbose. It doesn’t feel like the right way.

After scouring for a bit and looking at a log of examples, I’m still not sure what the best way to do this is and there isn’t a cohesive guide that I’ve found.

Right now I have it working with:

start-stop-daemon --background --quiet --start --pidfile $PIDFILE \
                --make-pidfile --chuid $DAEMONUSER \
                --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS

With DAEMON and DAEMON_OPTS as:

DAEMON="/home/mediamogul/perl5/perlbrew/perls/current/bin/start_server"
DAEMON_OPTS="--port $PORT -- starman --workers $WORKERS /home/mediamogul/MediaMogul/script/mediamogul.psgi"

This then requires me to adjust how to detect running, because it’s a perl script so perl is showing up as the command and not “start_server”.

(I’m running this out of a perlbrew on that user account so it is completely separate from the system perl, that’s why the paths are pointing to a perl in the user dir)

Is this really the best way to go about doing this? It seems very clunky to me, but I’m not an admin type.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use the --pid option to starman to have it write the PID when the app starts, if you use the same filename as you give start-stop-daemon then it will work nicly.

    For example, from one of my init.d scripts:

    
SITENAME=mysite
PORT=5000
DIR=/websites/mysite
SCRIPT=bin/app.pl
USER=davidp

    PIDFILE=/var/run/site-$SITENAME.pid

    case "$1" in
    start)
    start-stop-daemon --start --chuid $USER --chdir $DIR \
    --pidfile=$PIDFILE \
    --exec /usr/local/bin/starman -- -p $PORT $SCRIPT -D --pid $PIDFILE
    ;;
    stop)
    start-stop-daemon --stop --pidfile $PIDFILE
    ;;
    *)
    echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop}" >&2
    exit 3
    ;;
    esac

    It's very close to what you are already doing, and I'll admit it is a little clumsy, granted, but it works - having Starman write the PID file means that start-stop-daemon can reliably start & stop it.

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