30. On an amazon linux instance, I have two scripts called start_my_app and stop_my_app which start and stop forever (which in turn run my node.js app). I use these scripts to manually start and stop my node app.So far so good. My problem: I also want to set it up such that start_my_app is run whenever the system boots up. simple approach is to add a line in /etc/rc.local : or if you want to run the command as root : (the trailing ampersand backgrounds the process and allows the rc.local to continue executing). If you want a full init script, debian distro have a template file, so : and adapt it a bit.