Automatically start Camlistore at login on OSX

Automatically start Camlistore at login on OSX.md

I store my documents in a Camlistore, with a local instance running on my workstation and sync to an s3 bucket and a fixed server. Since I set this up 2 years ago, I've been manually starting camlistored and cammount inside a tmux session each time I log in to OSX.

Today I finally got around to setting up these processes to to start using the native OSX facility, launchd plists.

Steps:

• camlistored and cammount should be in /usr/local/bin. I have them symlinked via

cd /usr/local/bin && ln -s ~/go/camlistore.org/bin/cam* . && cd - ```

• Copy these plists to ~/Library/LaunchAgents. plists require absolute paths so replace each /Users/eric with your home dir.

  launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/camlistored.plist
  launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/cammount.plist
  

Details:

• Robust to failures (keep alive)

• Camlistored activates when cammount activates (but doesn't deactivate, after cammount deactivates, which seems like a bug in Launchd, if I understand the docs. To stop both, run:

  launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/cammount.plist
  launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/camlistored.plist
  

• Service logs in ~/Library/Logs. You can view them in Console.app.

• If you run a remote server, you could just use cammount.plist

• If you want to edit these files, you might want to download the LaunchControl.app editor, which provides a number of niceties:

  • Inline docs for plist directives
  • Continuous validation
  • Auto reload on save
  • ...

camlistored.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>KeepAlive</key>
	<dict>
		<key>OtherJobActive</key>
		<dict>
			<key>cammount</key>
			<true/>
		</dict>
		<key>OtherJobEnabled</key>
		<dict>
			<key>cammount</key>
			<true/>
		</dict>
	</dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>camlistored</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/usr/local/bin/camlistored</string>
		<string>-openbrowser=false</string>
	</array>
	<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
	<string>/Users/eric/Library/Logs/Camlistored.log</string>
	<key>StandardOutPath</key>
	<string>/Users/eric/Library/Logs/Camlistored.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>

cammount.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>cammount</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/usr/local/bin/cammount</string>
		<string>/Users/eric/Store</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
	<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
	<string>/Users/eric/Library/Logs/Cammount.log</string>
	<key>StandardOutPath</key>
	<string>/Users/eric/Library/Logs/Cammount.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>