Autostarting Python scripts on boot using crontab on rasbian

Question

I am a pretty new python programmer and am a little bit familiar with crontab. What I am trying to do is probably not the best practice but it is what I am most familiar with.

I have a raspberry pi with a couple python scripts I want to run on boot and stay running in the background. They are infinite loop programs. They are tested and working in a cmd terminal and have been function for a couple weeks. Just getting tired on manually starting them up. When the pi goes through a power cycle.

So I did a sudo crontab -e and added this line as my only entry

@reboot /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/script.py &

If I copy paste this exactly (minus the @reboot) it will run successfully in the cmd line.

I am using a cmd: pgrep -af python to check to see if it is running. I normally see two scripts running there but not the one I am trying to add.

I am not sure where I am going wrong or my best method to troubleshoot my issue. From the research I have been doing it seems like it should work.

Thanks for your help Kevin

Answer 1

You might find it easier to create a systemd service file for each program that you want to start when you Raspberry Pi boots. systemd comes with a few more tools to help you debug your configuration.

This is what an example systemd service file (located at /etc/systemd/system/myscript.service ) would look like:

[Unit]
Description=My service
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/script.py
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/myscript
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and then you can enable this program to run on boot with the command:

sudo systemctl enable myscript.service

These examples are from Raspberry Pi's documentation about systemd . But because systemd is widely used in the Linux world, so you can also follow documentation and StackOverflow answers for other Linux distributions.