Automatically Run a Program on Startup Under Linux Ubuntu

Start a python script at startup automatically?

1) Don't use old "init.d" method. Use something modern. If you have Ubuntu 15.04 and higher, you can use Systemd to create daemon that will be started automatically at startup. If you have for example Ubuntu older than 15.04 - use Upstart.

For Systemd:

Create unit file in /lib/systemd/system/you_service_name.service with the following content (as far as I can see your python script doesn't spawn new process while running, so Type should be simple. More info here):

[Unit]
Description=<your_service_name>
After=network.target network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=<required_user_name>
Group=<required_group_name>
Restart=always
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /var/run/<your_service_name>
PIDFile=/var/run/<your_service_name>/service.pid
ExecStart=/path/to/python_executable /path/to/your/script.py

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save this file and reload systemd:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Then add your service to autostart:

sudo systemctl enable you_service_name.service

you should see that Systemd created required symlinks after enable action.

Reboot and see if it's up and running (ps aux | grep python or sudo systemctl status you_service_name.service). If there is something weird - check Systemd journal:

sudo journalctl -xe

UPD:

To launch your python script in desired virtualenv, just use this expression in your service unit file:

ExecStart=/venv_home/path/to/python /venv_home/path/to/your/script.py

2) You can also use crontab, but you need to specify full path for desired shell there, for example:

@reboot /bin/bash /path/to/script.sh

If you need additional help - just let me know here.

Autostart C application in Ubuntu before to login

Yeah, that document looks good. It talks about what I was going to say, use init scripts.

How to run Java application on startup of Ubuntu Linux

Ideally you should create a service wrapper for your java application and then make this service run on startup example here.

Use

sudo update-rc.d mytestserv defaults to run your service wrapper on startup on Ubuntu

How to run a shell script at startup

The file you put in /etc/init.d/ have to be set to executable with:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/start_my_app

As pointed out by @meetamit, if it still does not run you might have to create a symbolic link to the file in /etc/rc.d/

ln -s /etc/init.d/start_my_app /etc/rc.d/

Please note that on the latest versions of Debian, this will not work as your script will have to be LSB compliant (provide at least the following actions: start, stop, restart, force-reload, and status):
https://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts

As a note, you should always use the absolute path to files in your scripts instead of the relative one, it may solve unexpected issues:

/var/myscripts/start_my_app

Finally, make sure that you included the shebang on top of the file:

#!/bin/sh

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