Matt Woodward's Blog

The last step for my Ubuntu setup (from a development standpoint anyway--I have other stuff to do like get my MP3 player working) was to create startup scripts for Apache and CF since I don't want to start that stuff manually every time I boot my machine.



First a quick plug for Dave Shuck's excellent post on installing Apache 2 and CF on Ubuntu. The only change I made to his instructions was to create a symlink to the CF administrator files instead of copying them over into Apache's docroot.



For the startup scripts I consulted a Linux administrator friend. If you're just getting into Linux, make friends with a Linux administrator immediately. :-) The apache one turned out to be quite simple--just create two symlinks to the apache command as follows, in the /etc/rc2.d directory:



ln -s /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl S91httpd

ln -s /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl K91httpd



To translate, that tells the OS to run 'apachectl start' on boot, and 'apachectl stop' on shutdown, based on the S and K before the two links. The number 91 specifies the order in which things are loaded. As for the rc2.d, the scripts in this directory are run at runlevel 2 (you can learn more about runlevel here).



Basically, due to the fact that these symlinks are put in the rc2.d directory, the OS scans and runs all the "S"-prefixed scripts at startup, and all the "K"-prefixed scripts at shutdown, but it does this by tacking "start" and "stop" to the end of the command pointed to in the link.



Since CF's startup command is a bit different, this was trickier, which is why it's handy to have a Linux guru you can call on for help. Tacking start and stop onto the jrun command won't quite suffice so a custom script is needed. The script looks like this:



#!/bin/bash

case "$1" in

    start)

        /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun -start cfusion

        ;;

    stop)

        /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun -stop cfusion

        ;;

esac



You can save this script anywhere you want, and similarly to the above, you just create a symlink, but this time to the script file itself. In my case I called my script file 'cfusion_startup.sh' and stored it in the /opt/jrun4/bin directory, so the symlinks look like this:



ln -s /opt/jrun4/bin/cfusion_startup.sh S92cfusion

ln -s /opt/jrun4/bin/cfusion_startup.sh K92cfusion



Now I don't know for sure, but this may still tack "start" and "stop" on the end of things, but it seems to work anyway. I put the number 92 on these so that CF will start and stop right after apache does.



Hope that helps someone else. As always YMMV but this works for me. I'm by no means a Linux guru at this level (hence another thanks to my Linux expert friend), so if any of you have other ways of doing this, I'd love to see some other approaches.