Disable autostart for a service without uninstalling?

Question

How can I disable autostart for a service without uninstalling? For example, I'd like to leave tomcat installed, but I don't want it turning on every time I restart.

Solution 1

This should do the trick:

Open terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and enter the following command:

sudo update-rc.d tomcat disable

Basically update-rc.d will modify existing runlevel links for the script /etc/init.d/tomcat by renaming start links to stop links.

Solution 2

More generic and more visual, with a nice UI: sysv-rc-conf

Uncheck the boxes for tomcat7 (runlevels 2 to 5), quit and that's it.

Solution 3

The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future. I suggest you use the following command to remove all the symlinks in /etc/rc?.d/:

update-rc.d -f tomcat remove

Solution 4

For upstart jobs, you need to disable service like this (e.g. mysql):

$ sudo -s
# echo "manual" > /etc/init/mysql.override
# exit

or using this one-liner:

$ echo "manual" | sudo tee /etc/init/mysql.override > /dev/null

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Comments

[ffflabs]

This one worked for me. I had uninstalled tomcat manually yet it was trying to shut it down before any reboot. Disable without -f parameter yelded "file does not exists".

[STW]

cool, that's a tool I haven't seen before. It was useful to confirm that the update-rc.d command actually had worked

[eaykin]

Note that the default tomcat service name is "tomcat7" in ubuntu 14.

[Erin Drummond]

+ 1 million, this is what worked for me. I was trying to stop transmission-daemon from starting on startup and the update-rc.d method used to work, but it looks like its been converted to an Upstart script now so this is the only method that works

[Dung]

If your tomcat is tomcat6 you will need to do "sudo update-rc.d tomcat6 disable" else you will get error.

[twig]

Thanks, this worked for me and disabling mongodb! Couldn't seem to get it working with echo so I did it the oldschool sudo vi /etc/init/mongodb.override way

[mlissner]

Weirdly, this removed the links, and then created some new ones when I did it for postgresql. Dunno.

[Sahil Arora]

You might want to consider this message in the update-rc.d: The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future.