debugging /etc/init.d startup scripts in Ubuntu
Have custom dropr message queue pollers I'm trying to start up via /etc/init.d in ubuntu. All 3 scripts are super-simple one liners and work perfect via command line, but for some reason, only one of them actually works when the server boots up. All have 775 perms, and this works great:
sudo /etc/init.d/app-poller.sh
Here's an example script (has to run as www-data user):
[/etc/init.d]$ cat /etc/init.d/app-poller.sh
#!/bin/sh
su - www-data -c "bash -c '/path/to/dropr-server/daemons/app-poller.php'"
I've run removed / re-entered the inittab entries several times via:
updates-rc.d -f app-poller.sh remove
updates-rc.d app-poller.sh defaults
rcconf script also says everything is starting fine. I've followed all the instructions here: http://jonathonhill.net/2009-04-23/auto-start-a-shell-script-on-ubuntu-server/ here and here: http://stringofthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/adding-removing-shell-scripts-ubuntu-810/
And I've looked for output in all the usual suspects (/var/log/messages, /var/log/daemons, etc)... still no clue.
Would very much like to at least have some insight into why this is failing. Anyone know which logfiles I can reference to see what is going wrong & why?
Answer
Try calling the init-script while simulating the boottime environment:
env -i LANG="$LANG" PATH="$PATH" TERM="$TERM" /etc/init.d/your-daemon start
Do add some debug output to your script if you don't see any output from that command.