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I like to respawn a service when the service goes down. I have added it to inittab however I cannot kill it when i need to.

Is there away i can respawn a service however be able to kill it manually when i need to.

thanks in advance

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What version of Ubuntu are you running? – voretaq7♦ Nov 15 '12 at 21:57

2 Answers

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Ubuntu has switched to Upstart for its init daemon, so the best way would be to make an Upstart job file in /etc/init/. Here's an example:

description "My important service"

start on filesystem or runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn

exec /usr/bin/mydaemon --some-args

If this file is saved as /etc/init/myjob.conf, it will create a job that starts at boot, respawns when it dies, and can be manually stopped (as root) with stop myjob, service myjob stop, or initctl stop myjob.

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...what if he's running a pre-upstart version of Ubuntu? :) – voretaq7♦ Nov 15 '12 at 21:57
@voretaq7 Then he should upgrade, because the last version that didn't have Upstart was 6.06LTS (dapper), which stopped being supported in 2009 (2011 for servers). – bonsaiviking Nov 16 '12 at 12:24
Prior to 10.04LTS (lucid), the Upstart directory was /etc/event.d/, but those versions are also no longer supported. Here's a handy resource for Ubuntu end-of-life dates. – bonsaiviking Nov 16 '12 at 12:33
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Non-Upstart systems

Old-school use of /etc/inittab. http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?inittab+5

The basic format is

<uniqueid>:<runlevel>:<action>:<command>

Upstart systems

Modern use of .conf files in /etc/init/: http://linux.die.net/man/5/init

The inittab method from above will still work.

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For completeness, one of the most common init schemes is sysvinit, which consists of scripts in /etc/init.d/, symlinked from the appropriate /etc/rc[RUNLEVEL].d/, frequently configured with update-rc.d. – bonsaiviking Nov 16 '12 at 12:28

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