How to start a Go program as a daemon in Ubuntu?

Question

What is the proper way to start a Go program as a daemon in Ubuntu ? I will then monitor it with Monit. Should I just do something like:

go run myapp.go & 

Are there things specific to Go that I should take into account ?

Answer 1

You should build an executable for your program (go build) and then either write a script for upstart and it will run your program as a daemon for you, or use an external tool like daemonize. I prefer the latter solution, because it does not depend on a system-dependent upstart. With daemonize you can start your application like

daemonize -p /var/run/myapp.pid -l /var/lock/subsys/myapp -u nobody /path/to/myapp.exe 

This will give you a well-behaving unix daemon process with all necessary daemon preparations done by daemonize.

Answer 2

There is a bug report regarding the ability to daemonize from within a Go program: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=227

But if what you are after is just detaching from the process I have seen recommendations to either do one of the following:

nohup go run myapp.go 

or

go run myapp.go & disown 

You can also make use of a process manager, like writing an init.d, Startup, or using something like Supervisor, which I personally really like.