Best practice to run Linux service as a different user

Question

Services default to starting as root at boot time on my RHEL box. If I recall correctly, the same is true for other Linux distros which use the init scripts in

Answer 1

on a CENTOS (Red Hat) virtual machine for svn server: edited /etc/init.d/svnserver to change the pid to something that svn can write:

pidfile=${PIDFILE-/home/svn/run/svnserve.pid}

and added option --user=svn:

daemon --pidfile=${pidfile} --user=svn $exec $args

The original pidfile was /var/run/svnserve.pid. The daemon did not start becaseu only root could write there.

 These all work:
/etc/init.d/svnserve start
/etc/init.d/svnserve stop
/etc/init.d/svnserve restart