Give Me a Lightbulb

Running scripts at startup (Ubuntu)

There is quite a bit of advice online about how to run scripts automatically at startup on Ubuntu. Most of them provide instructions about how to use rc.local for this task. As I looked at this option, though, it seemed a little complicated for my tastes.

After doing some poking around, the method that appealed most to me, and seemed to be both safe and reliable, was to use a cron job. The linked post spells out the rationale and steps, but for my own records, this is the process I used:

  1. Compose the script. I typically keep mine in /home/[user]/.local/bin/ which is on my PATH. In my case, I wanted to keep a copy of an app profile at each startup, as rude things sometimes happened if it was updated: so I have an app-copy-profile script.

  2. Set up the cron job. There are different approaches advocated here, but since this is dead easy, I simply invoke $ crontab -e, which opens for me in the nano editor. At the bottom of the file, I added the line:

    @reboot /home/[user]/.local/bin/app-copy-profile

    Save, and done.

Now, at each startup (not only “reboot”), the script runs. This can be implemented for multiple scripts, of course.

#notes #tech