autostart a program

[jacques]

Hello using an inovato quadra and would like it to start a specific program on boot how do I go about doing such a thing

 

Pointer or instructions appreciated

 

Thank you Jacques 

[bedna]

I would use systemd.

 

Depending on what application you are talking about, a simple or oneshot service should do the trick.

 

Read the first two examples in the manual: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html#Examples

Assuming you mean an application started by the system and not your user, select the version that fits your situation, create/edit the file /etc/systemd/system/name_your_service.service with the contents needed, for example:

[Unit]
Description=Service to start "application"

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/path/to/application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

 

Then enable the service and reboot.

sudo systemctl enable name_your_service.service
sudo reboot now

 

You can use "systemctl status name_your_service.service" to see status, or "journalctl -u name_your_service.service" to see logs.

 

You should obv change the name of the service from name_your_service to something fitting.

 

If you want the application to run even earlier at boot, you can change multi-user.target to basic.target instead, but be mindful that if you do that and the application requires for example network to be available, you then also need to add "After=network-online.target".

Instead, it's usually better to use "Before" and "After" variables and stay on multi-user.target.

Please see manual in link above and https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.unit.html for more advanced usage.

Edited 1 hour ago by bedna