Question

I’ve been trying to write a startup script for my play2 application but I can’t get it to work as a background task. I started out at the docs and came up with the script below.

Script:

#! /bin/sh

# description: Starts autocomplete play app using daemon
# 1. Go to $APPLICATION_PATH and prepare for dev by doing: play clean compile stage
#    This will create a start script at target/start
# 2. Start the application by running this script

. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

PLAY_HOME=/opt/play
PLAY=$PLAY_HOME/play
NAME=autocomplete
DESC="autocomplete application"
PID_FILE=/var/run/autocomplete/$NAME.pid    

# Path to the JVM
JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/latest
export JAVA_HOME
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

APPLICATION_PATH=/opt/playapps/autocomplete

DAEMON_OPTS="-Dconfig.file=/opt/playapps/autocomplete/conf/application-dev.conf"

start()
{
    echo -n "Starting $DESC with: --pidfile $PID_FILE ${APPLICATION_PATH}/target/start $DAEMON_OPTS"
    daemon --pidfile $PID_FILE "${APPLICATION_PATH}/target/start $DAEMON_OPTS"
}
stop()
{
  echo -n $"Stopping $DESC:"
  #NOT DONE YET
}


case "$1" in
  start)
    start
    ;;
  stop)
    stop
    ;;
esac

exit $RETVAL

I have google the issue and found solutions like this but they are using the
start-stop-daemon that I do not have on my Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 (Tikanga) dist. I would rather not install any other software to make this work if it’s possible. What have I missed to make this work as a background task and detach it from the console? CTRL+D do not work and CTRL+C quits the process.

Answer 1

Ok here is one solution after tips from favoretti:

#! /bin/sh

# description: Starts autocomplete play app using daemon
# 1. Go to $APPLICATION_PATH and prepare for dev by doing: play clean compile stage
#    This will create a start script at target/start
# 2. Start the application by running this script
# created by: Jakob

. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

PLAY_HOME=/opt/play
PLAY=$PLAY_HOME/play
NAME=autocomplete
DESC="autocomplete application"

# Path to the JVM
JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/latest
export JAVA_HOME
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

APPLICATION_PATH=/opt/playapps/autocomplete

DAEMON_OPTS="-Dconfig.file=/opt/playapps/autocomplete/conf/application-dev.conf"

start()
{
        echo -n "Starting $DESC with: $APPLICATION_PATH/target/start $DAEMON_OPTS &"
        $APPLICATION_PATH/target/start $DAEMON_OPTS &
}
stop()
{
        echo -n $"Stopping $DESC:"
        kill `cat $APPLICATION_PATH/RUNNING_PID`
}


case "$1" in
  start)
    start
    ;;
  stop)
        stop
        ;;
esac

exit $RETVAL

You will need to CTRL+D to get out of the console which isn’t exactly what I had in mind. Maybe there is someone out there with a better solution?