[SOLVED] Set up app as an init.d daemon, but it isn't running in background and stdout isn't blocked

Abscissa256 · 02-13-2013, 04:07 PM

I'm fairly new to linux daemons (doing this on Debian 6), and I have a custom HTTP server I want to set up to run as a daemon.

I copied and modified /etc/init.d/skeleton appropriately, and my program does run when I do "service myapp start". BUT it runs in the foreground and also stdin/stdout are still connected to my terminal. Is there a simple way to fix that without modifying the app, or is having the app itself disconnect its own stdin/out/err and then go into the background really the only way to do this?

Abscissa256 · 02-14-2013, 12:48 AM

Ok, I think I figured it out. In my daemon's init.d script (ie from the skeleton file), inside the do_start() function, there are two calls to "start-stop-daemon". It seems I just needed to add the arguments "--background" and "--make-pidfile" to both of them. Seems to work fine now. Although I understand that if my daemon did any forking, then this would *not* work. Fortunately it doesn't fork on its own, so this seems to work.