We’re using an old version of Upstart, on Centos, to manage stopping and starting our Node.js daemons, and one of the things the script does, like any good deamon, is change the user of the deamon process from root to something more applicable, security and all that 😉
The scripts look a little like this
!upstart
description "Amazing Node.js Daemon"
author "idimmu"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
env PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
env NAME="amazing-daemon"
script
export HOME="/root"
cd /opt/idimmu/$NAME
echo $$ > /var/run/$NAME.pid
exec sudo -u idimmu /usr/bin/node /opt/idimmu/$NAME/server.js >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log 2>&1
end script
pre-start script
echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (upstart) Starting $NAME" >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log
end script
pre-stop script
rm /var/run/$NAME.pid
echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (upstart) Stopping $NAME" >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log
end scriptWhich is nice, as it means we can use Upstart to stop/start/status deamons really nicely. The equivalent init.d script looked really horrible.