Several people have asked me if there’s a way to start up Tracks on your own machine when it boots or when you login. The answer if you’re using Mac OS X Tiger is yes—there’s an easy way.

NOTE: There’s now a better way to do this, which only involves one file.

Tiger comes with a new system for starting, stopping and monitoring processes called launchd. I found the discussions on MacOSXHints and Mac Geekery very useful when I was putting this together, and both are well worth reading if you want to find out more about the capabilities for launchd. However, I thought I’d save you a bit of hassle by putting the files together myself.

• Download the files here and unzip the package. You’ll find two files inside: com.rousette.tracks.plist and start_tracks.
• You need to edit both (using a text editor) and replace ‘YOURUSERNAME’ with your real user name. Unless your actual user name is ‘YOURUSERNAME’—some people have a funny sense of humour. You might also want to change the port in start_tracks from the default 3030 if you have another app running on that port.
• Put the start_tracks file in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/launchd, making the folders if necessary.
• Make sure start_tracks is executable by issuing this command in the Terminal:

  
  cd ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/launchd
  chmod +x start_tracks
  
  

• Put the file com.rousette.tracks.plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, again, making the folders if necessary.

When you next log in, the WEBrick server should start automatically. If you want to start it manually now, run:

launchctl load Library/LaunchAgents/com.rousette.tracks.plist

or

launchctl unload Library/LaunchAgents/com.rousette.tracks.plist

to unload it. It seems that unloading the script doesn’t actually stop the server, so if you want to stop it, you’ll have to find the process ID and use that to kill it:

ps ax | grep -i "ruby script/server" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'

then note the number you get back (let’s say it’s 1283)

kill 1283

This method starts the server at user login, and doesn’t restart the server if it crashes or is stopped for some other reason. If you want to start the server when the computer boots, put the plist file in the root level Library folder (i.e. /Library/LaunchAgents), and put the start_tracks file in somewhere like /usr/local/bin. If you want the server to re-launch automatically when it gets killed, take a look at the manpage for launchd.plist. I think that it would probably work if you replace the RunAtLoad parameter with OnDemand, which should be set to false—but I haven’t tested that.

This method has started up WEBrick, but you could easily adapt it by replacing the command starting WEBrick in start_tracks with one starting lighttpd.

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