This was rather interesting, but something I would like to add for us Debian admins is the start-stop-daemon(8).

With this little gem it is very easy to write your own startup scripts.

Here is my skeleton startup script:

#! /bin/sh

# /etc/init.d/jboss: start and stop the jboss daemon

SSD=/sbin/start-stop-daemon
ECHO=/bin/echo
TEST=/usr/bin/test
HOSTNAME=`/bin/hostname`
MYAPP=/path/to/app
MYAPPNAME=app

$TEST -x $MYAPP || exit 0

case "$1" in
  start)
        $ECHO -n "Starting $MYAPPNAME: $MYAPP"
        $SSD -c myusername --start -b --quiet -p /var/run/app.pid -m --exec /path/to/app
        $ECHO "."
        ;;
  stop)
        $ECHO -n "Stopping $MYAPPNAME: $MYAPP"
        $SSD --stop -p /var/run/app.pid
        $ECHO "."
        ;;

  *)
        $ECHO "Usage: /etc/init.d/$MYAPPNAME {start|stop)"
        exit 1
esac

exit 0