How to start a Go program as a daemon in Ubuntu?

Question

What is the proper way to start a Go program as a daemon in Ubuntu ? I will then monitor it with Monit. Should I just do something like:

go run myapp.go &         


        

Answer 1

You should build an executable for your program (go build) and then either write a script for upstart and it will run your program as a daemon for you, or use an external tool like daemonize. I prefer the latter solution, because it does not depend on a system-dependent upstart. With daemonize you can start your application like

daemonize -p /var/run/myapp.pid -l /var/lock/subsys/myapp -u nobody /path/to/myapp.exe

This will give you a well-behaving unix daemon process with all necessary daemon preparations done by daemonize.