Installing Spring Boot Applications

systemd is the successor of the System V init system and is now being used by many modern Linux distributions. Although you can continue to use init.d scripts with systemd, it is also possible to launch Spring Boot applications by using systemd ‘service’ scripts.

Assuming that you have a Spring Boot application installed in /var/myapp, to install a Spring Boot application as a systemd service, create a script named myapp.service and place it in /etc/systemd/system directory. The following script offers an example:

[Unit]
Description=myapp
After=syslog.target

[Service]
User=myapp
ExecStart=/var/myapp/myapp.jar
SuccessExitStatus=143

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

	Important
	Remember to change the Description, User, and ExecStart fields for your application.

	The ExecStart field does not declare the script action command, which means that the run command is used by default.

Note that, unlike when running as an init.d service, the user that runs the application, the PID file, and the console log file are managed by systemd itself and therefore must be configured by using appropriate fields in the ‘service’ script. Consult the service unit configuration man page for more details.

To flag the application to start automatically on system boot, use the following command:

$ systemctl enable myapp.service

Refer to man systemctl for more details.