How to Auto-start Services on Boot in Linux?

One of the essential for a system administrator to know is how to configure service at boot, so when a server gets reboot, they start automatically.

There could be various reasons for server reboot, including the following.

• Scheduled as weekly, monthly
• Unexpected due to hardware/kernel issue

By doing the right configuration, you don’t have to start them manually each time you reboot.

The following examples are for two popular distros tested on DigitalOcean servers.

Linux/CentOS

Let’s configure Apache HTTP server to start at boot.

You can keep any script file name, and here I’ve kept httpd

• Become as root user on your Linux server
• Create or copy your script under /etc/init.d/

[[email protected] init.d]# ls -ltr httpd
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 3371 Jan 6 08:56 httpd
[[email protected] init.d]#

We will use chkconfig utility which is available default on Linux or CentOS.

• Add script to start on boot using chkconfig with --add parameter

[[email protected] init.d]# chkconfig --add httpd
[[email protected] init.d]# chkconfig httpd on

• Confirm script is added successfully with --list

[[email protected] init.d]# chkconfig --list httpd
httpd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
[[email protected] init.d]#

That’s all! httpd script will be called to start services on Linux boot.

In case you need to disable auto-start service then you can use the following commands

chkconfig httpd off
chkconfig --del httpd

Ubuntu

Configuring auto-start services in Ubuntu is slightly different. Let’s say script name is nginx

• Login to Ubuntu server with root
• Copy the script in /etc/init.d/ folder
• Execute the below command

update-rc.d nginx defaults

Reboot the server to ensure services are started. This has helped me and I believe will be beneficial to you as well.

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