Setting a script to run at boot on Ubuntu

Question

I need to kick off some processes on server boot, but I need them to run as a specific user. At the moment I only have a load startup.sh's lying around.

Server is Ubuntu 8.04

Answer 1

As an alternative option, you can put it in the specific user's crontab, like this:

@reboot command-to-run

Edit: Before I forget, as root, you can edit a specific user's crontab with

crontab -u username -e

More documentation at Debian Administration.

Answer 2

The short answer is to put a

su username -c "/path/to/your/script.sh"

in the ubuntu equivalent of rc.local.

See this RcLocalHowto to prepare your system to have its local init script