Systemd and Upstart Services

Emmanouil GkatziourasApril 29th, 2016Last Updated: April 25th, 2016

0 46 1 minute read

Most linux servers that I use are either Debian based or RedHat based. A common task is adding daemon services. Suppose that we want to start a tomcat application on startup First we shall install tomcat

mkdir /opt/tomcat
groupadd tomcat
useradd -s /bin/false -g tomcat -d /opt/tomcat tomcat
wget http://apache.cc.uoc.gr/tomcat/tomcat-8/v8.0.33/bin/apache-tomcat-8.0.33.tar.gz
tar xvf apache-tomcat-8.0.33.tar.gz
mv apache-tomcat-8.0.33/* /opt/tomcat
rm -r apache-tomcat-8.0.33 apache-tomcat-8.0.33.tar.gz 
cd /opt/tomcat
chgrp -R tomcat conf
chmod g+rwx conf
chmod g+r conf/*
chown -R tomcat work/ temp/ logs/

In case of Systemd we should add a tomcat.service file on /etc/systemd/system. The file /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service shall contain

[Unit]
Description=Apache Tomcat Web Application Container
After=syslog.target network.target
 
[Service]
Type=forking
 
Environment=JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default
Environment=CATALINA_PID=/opt/tomcat/temp/tomcat.pid
Environment=CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat
Environment=CATALINA_BASE=/opt/tomcat
Environment='CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms512M -Xmx1024M -server -XX:+UseParallelGC'
Environment='JAVA_OPTS=-Duser.timezone=UTC -Djava.awt.headless=true -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom'
 
ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
ExecStop=/bin/kill -15 $MAINPID
 
User=tomcat
Group=tomcat
 
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I specified the script to start after syslog and network are enabled. As we can see systemd handles the tomcat as a daemon and kills the pid. With User and Group we specify the user and the group that the process should be run as. Systemd will handle the upstart process and kill it using the PID. To enable and run you have to issue

systemctl enable tomcat
systemctl start tomcat

In case of upstart we should create a tomcat.conf file in /etc/init/. The content of /etc/init/tomcat.conf

description     "Tomcat instance"
author          "Emmanouil Gkatziouras"
 
respawn
respawn limit 2 5
 
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]
 
setuid tomcat
setgid tomcat
 
env CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat
 
script
        $CATALINA_HOME/bin/catalina.sh run
end script
 
post-stop script
        rm -rf $CATALINA_HOME/temp/*
end script

It will start on run levels 2,3,4 or 5. The group and the user id to be executed would be tomcat. After tomcat is stopped the post script block will remove the temp files. Instead of starting the process inn the background as a daemon,, upstart will handle the process on the foreground. To start just issue