How to run a shell script at startup

On an Amazon S3 Linux instance, I have two scripts called start_my_app and stop_my_app which start and stop forever (which in turn runs my Node.js application). I use these scripts to manually start and stop my Node.js application. 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. I know that I need to add a file inside init.d and I know how to symlink it to the proper directory within rc.d, but I can't figure out what actually needs to go inside the file that I place in init.d. I'm thinking it should be just one line, like, start_my_app, but that hasn't been working for me.

Set a crontab for this

#crontab -e
@reboot  /home/user/test.sh

after every startup it will run the test script.

In the file you put in /etc/init.d/ you have to set it executable with:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/start_my_app

Thanks to @meetamit, if this does not run you have to create a symlink to /etc/rc.d/

ln -s /etc/init.d/start_my_app /etc/rc.d/

Please note that on latest Debian, this will not work as your script have to be LSB compliant (provide, at least, the following actions: start, stop, restart, force-reload, and status): https://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts

As a note, you should put the absolute path of your script instead of a relative one, it may solves unexpected issues:

/var/myscripts/start_my_app

And don't forget to add on top of that file:

#!/bin/sh