Run java jar file on a server as background process

Question

You can try this:

#!/bin/sh
nohup java -jar /web/server.jar &

The & symbol, switches the program to run in the background.

The nohup utility makes the command passed as an argument run in the background even after you log out.

Systemd which now runs in the majority of distros

Step 1:

Find your user defined services mine was at /usr/lib/systemd/system/

Step 2:

Create a text file with your favorite text editor name it whatever_you_want.service

Step 3:

Put following Template to the file whatever_you_want.service

[Unit]
Description=webserver Daemon

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -jar /web/server.jar
User=user

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Step 4:

Run your service
as super user

$ systemctl start whatever_you_want.service # starts the service
$ systemctl enable whatever_you_want.service # auto starts the service
$ systemctl disable whatever_you_want.service # stops autostart
$ systemctl stop whatever_you_want.service # stops the service
$ systemctl restart whatever_you_want.service # restarts the service

If you're using Ubuntu and have "Upstart" (http://upstart.ubuntu.com/) you can try this:

Create /var/init/yourservice.conf

with the following content

description "Your Java Service"  
author "You"  

start on runlevel [3]  
stop on shutdown  

expect fork  

script     
    cd /web 
    java -jar server.jar >/var/log/yourservice.log 2>&1  
    emit yourservice_running  
end script  

Now you can issue the service yourservice start and service yourservice stop commands. You can tail /var/log/yourservice.log to verify that it's working.

If you just want to run your jar from the console without it hogging the console window, you can just do:

java -jar /web/server.jar > /var/log/yourservice.log 2>&1

Run in background and add logs to log file using the following:

nohup java -jar /web/server.jar > log.log 2>&1 &