Howto: get Azureus to start at boot and run headless (ie without a gui) on Linux

Getting Azureus to start at boot headless saves system resources and means it will work away nicely in the background. This approach works great with a web front-end like the Azureus Swing UI. To get the most out of bittorrent, you also need to make sure that it shuts down properly. Here are the steps I used to set it up...

Install and configure Azureus

• Download Azureus and decompress it into a directory
• Download log4j.jar and commons-cli.jar and put them in the directory you uncompressed Azureus into
• Run Azureus by opening a terminal, changing into the directory you put Azureus and typing
  

./azureus

• Configure Azureus with the GUI tool
• Exit Azureus
• Create a file called headless.sh with the following in it:

#!/bin/bash
java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console >/dev/null 2>&1

• Make that file executable by typing
  

chmod u+x headless.sh

• Create a file called azureus_rcscript with the following in it: (you need to change the AZ_USER and DIR variables to represent the name of the user who will be running Azureus and the directory Azureus is installed to)
  

#! /bin/sh
#rc script for Azureus by Phill - http://phillstechstuff.blogspot.com
#Based on script from Azureus wiki - http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/HeadlessSwingUIAtBoot

#The user that will run Azureus
AZ_USER=user

#your path to the azureus directory, where Azureus2.jar is located
DIR=/home/user/azureus

#executable files in the following paths that are perhaps needed by the script
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

#Description
DESC="Azureus daemon"

case "$1" in
start)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo "Azureus is already running!"
else
echo "Starting $DESC"
su $AZ_USER -c "cd $DIR; ./headless.sh"
fi
;;
stop)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo -n "Stopping $DESC"
su $AZ_USER -c "kill `ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`"
echo " ... done."
else
echo "Coulnd't find a running $DESC"
fi
;;
restart)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo -n "Stopping $DESC"
su $AZ_USER -c "kill `ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`"
echo " ... done."
else
echo "Coulnd't find a running $DESC"
fi
echo "Starting $DESC: $NAME"
su $AZ_USER -c "cd $DIR; ./headless.sh"
echo " ... done."
;;
status)
if [[ ` ps -ef | grep "java -jar Azureus2.jar --ui=console"|grep -v grep` ]]
then
echo "Azureus is RUNNING"
else
echo "Azureus is DOWN"
fi
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart}"
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

• Put that file inside the startup for the runlevel your machine runs at. For my machine, that is runlevel 5, and it is probably the same for yours if it boots up to a graphical environment. I did this by typing

su
mv azureus_rcscript.sh /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh
cp /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh /etc/rc5.d/K01azureus_rcscript.sh
chmod 755 /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh /etc/rc5.d/S99azureus_rcscript.sh

• The S99 makes it run this script after everything else has started up, which is good as it makes sure it won't try to run before things like network services have started. As the script also includes functionality to shut down Azureus, I copied it to have it run when we leave runlevel 5, which usually means shutdown time. The K01 means to run it before shutting down any other processes
  

That's it! If you reboot you should now have Azureus running in headless mode, and shutting down cleanly when you shutdown the system.

Please let me know if this works for you, and if you have any questions!