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

I needed to run a Spring .jar application as a service, and found a simple way to run this as a specific user:

I changed the owner and group of my jar file to the user I wanted to run as. Then symlinked this jar in init.d and started the service.

So:

#chown myuser:myuser /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/springApp/target/springApp-1.0.jar

#ln -s /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/springApp/target/springApp-1.0.jar /etc/init.d/springApp

#service springApp start

#ps aux | grep java
myuser    9970  5.0  9.9 4071348 386132 ?      Sl   09:38   0:21 /bin/java -Dsun.misc.URLClassPath.disableJarChecking=true -jar /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/springApp/target/springApp-1.0.jar