Upstart Intro, Cookbook and Best Practises

The purpose of this document is multi-faceted. It is intended as:

• A gentle introduction to Upstart.
• A Cookbook of recipes and best-practises for solving common and not so common problems.
• An extended guide to the configuration syntax of Upstart.

It attempts to explain the intricacies of Upstart with worked examples and lots of details.

Note that the reference documentation for Upstart will always be the manual pages: this is merely a supplement to them.

Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional init daemon—the method by which several Unix-like computer operating systems perform tasks when the computer is started. It was written by Scott James Remnant, a former employee of Canonical Ltd. In 2014, Upstart was placed in maintenance mode, and other init daemons, such as systemd, were recommended in place of Upstart. Ubuntu moved away from Upstart with the release of version 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) in favor of migrating to systemd. As of January 2022, there have been no updates released for Upstart since September 2014.