go-autostart

Go library to register your app to autostart on startup (supports Linux, macOS, and Windows).

Basic example

// Define your app's autostart behavior
app := autostart.New(autostart.Options{
    Label: "com.mycompany.MyApp",
    Vendor: "Company"
    Name: "My App",
    Description: "My app description",
    Mode: autostart.ModeUser,
    Arguments: []string{ /* ... */ },
})

// Enable, disable, or check the status
app.Enable()
app.Disable()
app.IsEnabled()

// To get other useful data
app.DataDir()
app.StdOutPath()
app.StdErrPath()

Supported platforms

• Linux (systemd)
• macOS (launchd)
• Windows (Service Manager)

Logging

When running your process as a service, it's a good idea to make a deliberate decision about where to send logs.

With go-autostart, you can specify file paths for both stdout and stderr. If you don't specify a path, a platform-specific default location will be chosen based on your app details.

app := autostart.New(autostart.Options{
    // ...
    StdoutPath: "/path/to/myapp.log",
    StderrPath: "/path/to/myapp.err",
})

You can create writers to your custom log files. This will override the global os.Stdout and os.Stderr with custom writers that send logs to both the program's stdio and the custom log files.

Run the following to override the global os.Stdout and os.Stderr with your custom log files. This function returns a new, wrapped version of stdout. If you still want to write logs to the console, in addition to the log file, writing to this new stdout will do both.

stdout, err := app.Stdio()

Then, to write logs to both the console and the log file:

// Write directly
fmt.Fprintln(stdout, "Hello, world!")

// Set the output for the `log` package
log.SetOutput(stdout)
log.Println("Hello, world!")

Full Example

// Define your app's autostart behavior
app := autostart.New(autostart.Options{
    Label: "com.mycompany.MyApp",
    Vendor: "Company"
    Name: "My App",
    Description: "My app description",
    Mode: autostart.ModeUser,
    Arguments: []string{ /* ... */ },
})

// Setup logging to the log files
stdout, err := app.Stdio()
log.SetOutput(stdout)

// Enable auto-start for the app
app.Enable()