Setting Crowd to Run Automatically and Use an Unprivileged System User on UNIX

This page contains some useful information about running Crowd under Linux/UNIX:

• Dedicated system user. For security reasons, and to keep your system administrator happy, you should probably create a dedicated non-root user to run Crowd.
• Automatic startup. It is useful to set up Crowd to run automatically on UNIX startup.

Running Crowd as an Unprivileged User

Here is an example of some of the changes you can make to harden up the directory and file permissions for Crowd to run as a non-root user.

You will need to update the environment variables to suit your installation. This is also for use in BASH. If you are using a different shell, you might need to tweak some things.

#!/bin/bash
CROWD_USER="crowd"
CROWD_GROUP="crowd"
INSTALL_BASE="/opt/crowd/atlassian-crowd-2.2.2"
CROWD_HOME="/opt/crowd/crowd-home"
sudo chgrp ${CROWD_GROUP} ${INSTALL_BASE}/{*.sh,apache-tomcat/bin/*.sh}
sudo chmod g+x ${INSTALL_BASE}/{*.sh,apache-tomcat/bin/*.sh}
sudo chown -R ${CROWD_USER} ${CROWD_HOME} ${INSTALL_BASE}/apache-tomcat/{logs,work}
sudo touch -a ${INSTALL_BASE}/atlassian-crowd-openid-server.log
sudo mkdir ${INSTALL_BASE}/database
sudo chown -R ${CROWD_USER} ${INSTALL_BASE}/{database,atlassian-crowd-openid-server.log

Getting Crowd to Start Automatically

1. Create an init.d file (for example, 'crowd.init.d') inside your {CROWD_INSTALL} directory:

   #!/bin/bash
   # Crowd startup script
   #chkconfig: 2345 80 05
   #description: Crowd
   
   
   # Based on script at http://www.bifrost.org/problems.html
   
   RUN_AS_USER=crowd
   CATALINA_HOME=/opt/crowd/apache-tomcat
   
   start() {
           echo "Starting Crowd: "
           if [ "x$USER" != "x$RUN_AS_USER" ]; then
             su - $RUN_AS_USER -c "$CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh"
           else
             $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh
           fi
           echo "done."
   }
   stop() {
           echo "Shutting down Crowd: "
           if [ "x$USER" != "x$RUN_AS_USER" ]; then
             su - $RUN_AS_USER -c "$CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh"
           else
             $CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh
           fi
           echo "done."
   }
   
   case "$1" in
     start)
           start
           ;;
     stop)
           stop
           ;;
     restart)
           stop
           sleep 10
           #echo "Hard killing any remaining threads.."
           #kill -9 `cat $CATALINA_HOME/work/catalina.pid`
           start
           ;;
     *)
           echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
   esac
   
   exit 0
   

2. Create a symbolic link from /etc/init.d/crowd to the init.d file file.

sudo /sbin/chkconfig --add SCRIPT_NAME