Upstart user jobs on Ubuntu 11.10

Recently I've been exploring Upstart's user jobs functionality. User jobs allow non-root users to have their own jobs in ~/.init/ that they can control.

The first thing I did was to create a simple job:

task

script
    sleep 5
end script

This job simply blocks for five seconds, which allows me to test whether user jobs are working properly. To use it I saved it to ~/.init/my-test-job.conf, and then started it via start my-test-job.

Unfortunately by default on Ubuntu 11.10, user jobs are disabled, which meant the start command failed with the error:

start: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.5" (uid=1000 pid=1655 comm="start my-test-job ") interface="com.ubuntu.Upstart0_6.Job" member="Start" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="com.ubuntu.Upstart" (uid=0 pid=1 comm="/sbin/init")

To enable user jobs, I had to edit /etc/dbus-1/system.d/Upstart.conf and change it to:


The original DBus configuration is far more restrictive in what messages it allows to reach Upstart (basically read/write for root and read for everyone else). The above configuration (taken from Upstart's source code) allows any user to control Upstart. This does seem like a security problem, but apparently Upstart can handle user permissions internally.

After making this change, I was able to start my job successfully:

$ start my-test-job
my-test-job stop/waiting

Documentation is pretty scarce, but there's a small section in the man page that's worth checking out (search for User Jobs).

Edit:

If you want user job start on stanzas to be honored, check out my more recent blog post about it