Today, I’m going to show you how to start up your Tornado apps at boot using upstart. For path names, I’m assuming some modern version of Ubuntu, such as 9.10 or higher. I’m also assuming that you have some project with an executable Python script that fires up the Tornado app. I usually have one file in all of my projects called web.py.

The important part of this file looks like this (mind the application and port variables):

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if __name__ == "__main__":
	http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(application)
	http_server.listen(port)
	tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

Got that in place? Good. Next, make a system user for your project to run as. In my example, I’ll be using projectuser as the username. Creating this user can be done like so:

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sudo useradd --system --user-group projectuser

Finally, create the file /etc/init/web.conf. It’s very important that this filename ends in .conf. The contents of this file should be as follows:

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\# torando project
start on runlevel 2
stop on runlevel \[!2\]
respawn

setuid projectuser
setgid projectuser

exec /path/to/project/web.py

That’s it! You can start your Tornado app by entering the command: sudo start web. If successful, you should see output similar to: ` ** web start/running, process 28058. You can also stop your projects using the command sudo stop web`.