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I have all of my upstart config files under version control. My ideal way to use upstart is to create soft links from my version control repository (mercurial - not that it matters) into /etc/init but upstart fails to see the jobs. Everything is fine if I copy the files from the repository directory to /etc/init.

Anyone know why upstart fails to handle symbolic or even hard links?

Thanks

Chris

Chris McCauley
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    Perhaps it was a design decision on the part of the Upstart developers to ignore soft links? Anyway, if your repository is on the same partition as `/etc/init`, try using hard links. – Steven Monday Oct 20 '10 at 18:06
  • Tried hard links and that didn't work either :-( – Chris McCauley Oct 20 '10 at 18:25
  • Lame. Indeed symlinks are ignored without a manual call to reload config. Sigh. I prefer symlinks. Cleaner in my use-case. Oh well. I'll just copy the files in, like jerk. – James T Snell Jan 03 '14 at 04:55

3 Answers3

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Upstart watches its configuration directories with inotify and reloads the configuration when any of the files change or a new file is added. Apparently this doesn't work for symlinks.

To manually update the configuration use

$ initctl reload-configuration
Fabian Jakobs
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  • this used to work reliably for me. lately on upstart 1.3 it only works on jobs that are stopped. – jcomeau_ictx Dec 18 '14 at 23:15
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    For me symlinks in /etc/init/ work but if I change the file behind the symlink the file is not re-read by the upstart tools. It took me hours to find out that the symlink is the reason. It acts like a cache that nobody wants to have. – peschü May 20 '15 at 14:44
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Upstart does not support symlinks because they might point to a file on a partition that is not loaded at boot time.

I have gotten around this in my own project by putting the conf files in /etc/init/myscripts and then binding that to a directory in my repository. mount --bind /etc/init/myscripts ~/code/repo/initscripts.

Add this to /etc/fstab and the binding will be persistent:

/etc/init/myscripts  /home/me/code/repo/initscripts      none    bind

This effectively gives you hard-linked directories. Upstart will treat the conf files as any other, because they are local to /etc/init. Your DVCS will also see them as local files in the repo, so it will also treat them as it would any other files stored there. Best of both worlds.

Alexander Garden
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As mentioned before:

initctl reload-configuration

However if you get an error like the following:

initctl: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.155" (uid=1000 pid=6177 comm="initctl reload-configuration ") interface="com.ubuntu.Upstart0_6" member="ReloadConfiguration" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="com.ubuntu.Upstart" (uid=0 pid=1 comm="/sbin/init")

You must invoke the sudo:

sudo initctl reload-configuration
Karl Morrison
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