Run forever task as root in init.d script on startup

Question

I'm trying to start a nodeJS Server on Raspbian on startup.

Everything works fine with this script:

#!/bin/sh
#/etc/init.d/myService
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          myService
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:
# Short-Description: your description here
### END INIT INFO
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
export NODE_PATH=$NODE_PATH:/usr/local/lib/node_modules

case "$1" in
start)
exec forever --sourceDir=/root/CamSlider -l forever.log -o out.log -e err.log -p /root/CamSlider server.js  #scriptarguments
;;
stop)
exec forever stop --sourceDir=/root/CamSliderr server.js
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/myService {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac
exit 0

This works fine. But somehow I get strange errors if my server gets started like this as oposed to a manual start within the shell as root with simply node server.js.

What could cause these problems? Do I need to start myService as root or do I need to run forever as root?

Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

Since version 8 (Jessie) Debian has switched to the new init system systemd. All Debian flavors, including Ubuntu and Raspbian, followed this. So old style init system SysV is deprecated and no more available. Its init scripts in /etc/init.d/ are only emulated by systemd for downstream Compatibility with SysV. But the last sentence in the document notes:

Note that there are some areas where systemd currently provides a certain amount of compatibility where we expect this compatibility to be removed eventually.

It seems this becomes more and more true. I suggest that you don't take more effort into fixing an emulated deprecated init system SysV. You should use a systemd Unit file to make your service.