Ubuntu – How to set a Upstart job to start manually

There was some progress with the release of version 1.4.:

New “setuid” and “setgid” stanzas to allow system jobs to be run under the specified uid/gid corresponding to the given name/group.

You can grab it from their LaunchPad page but (strangely) I can't see a PPA so you might have to compile it yourself.

Otherwise, use su or sudo in your exec command like so:

su -c "<commands>" <username>
sudo -u <username> <commands>

They both do pretty much the same thing so pick whichever you're happiest with. So using your example command:

exec sudo -u me "nzbget -D"

Try:

/var/log/upstart/JOBNAME.log

You may want to consider converting it to a task while you debug it.

start on spatial-start

task

exec /spatial/server_init.sh

then from the console:

initctl emit spatial-start
initctl status spatial-start