MikeL's FreeBSD howto

MikeL's FreeBSD howto - Autostart

This is basically a checklist of how to setup a process to be autostarted at boot time. The intent is not to cover everything in detail, merely to point you to each of the tasks that must be performed.

cd /usr/local/etc/rc.d
Copy an existing ".sh" file to the name of your deamon.
Edit that file, replacing whatever app it used with your own.
Note that a well-behaved deamon will leave a "deamon.pid" file in /var/run/ with the main processes PID where 'kill' messages should be routed. It should also print the name of the product to the console with no newline so that at boot-time one can see what's being started, and when.
Use which and/or find to determine where the package was installed.

As a sample, here's the file created by an Apache install:

  #!/bin/sh
  [ -x /usr/local/sbin/apachectl ] && /usr/local/sbin/apachectl startssl >/dev/null && echo -n ' apache'