I'm having trouble to start a service as a specific user (under Ubuntu 14.4) and I'm unsure what the problem is. I use the following command to autostart a jar-file on startup:
nohup ${JAVA_EXEC} -jar ${MICROSERVICE_HOME}/bin/${MICROSERVICE_JAR} server ${MICROSERVICE_CONF} 2>> /dev/null &
That works perfectly, therefore there is no problem with the variables and so on. Well, this script get's executed by the actual user, which is in this case, the root. Since I don't want to take any risks, I do want to execute it as a specific (already existing) user. Normally my approach would be to change the to command to:
nohup su some_user -c "${JAVA_EXEC} -jar ${MICROSERVICE_HOME}/bin/${MICROSERVICE_JAR} server ${MICROSERVICE_CONF}"
But this doesn't work. I don't get any error messages (of course I left out the redirection of stderr for test purposes) and the nohup.out is empty.
I already have tried different versions, e.g. replacing the double quotes with single quotes and masking the "$" inside the command. According to this thread it should work with the syntax.
None of the solutions in that thread do work. E.g.
su some_user -c "nohup ${JAVA_EXEC} -jar ${MICROSERVICE_HOME}/bin/${MICROSERVICE_JAR} server ${MICROSERVICE_CONF}" -> doesn't work
nohup runuser some_user c "nohup ${JAVA_EXEC} -jar ${MICROSERVICE_HOME}/bin/${MICROSERVICE_JAR} server ${MICROSERVICE_CONF}"-> doesn't work (the runuser commands doesn't exist).
What do I miss?
Any help is very appreciated!
