Gracefully starting/stopping Java apps on Linux

Question

I am trying to design a graceful startup/shutdown script (Bash) for a Java app (JAR) that I will be deploying to my Ubuntu 14.04 server. I'm looking for a clean, Linux- and Ubuntu-friendly way of starting the server like so:

java -jar myapp.jar <lots off subsequent arguments>

And then, in the shutdown script, finding the JAR's PID, issuing a SIGSTOP to allow the app to do a graceful shutdown on its own, and then finally killing the PID when its good and ready.

I looked at how Tomcat handles this with its own catalina.sh and was surprised to find it wasn't doing too much other magic under the hood then simply killing a PID.

I was wondering if upstart may be a good candidate for such a use case, and if so, how? Otherwise, what are some other approaches that I might be able to take? Any other Linux/Ubuntu facilities/tools/programs out there that I should consider?

Generally speaking, the preferred approach for servers generally (including database servers such as MySQL and Postgres) is for the server to open a control socket and then have the script send it commands. For a Java application, this could be a simple line-based custom protocol or a simple HTTP endpoint. — chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-, May 06 '14 at 00:53
Thanks @chrylis (+1) - do you have any links that you can share to other Java projects that use this approach? — AdjustingForInflation, May 06 '14 at 00:56
Tomcat is sort of unclean. That's why it says look for stale PIDs and kill any processes that are still running. — Engineer2021, May 06 '14 at 01:06

Gracefully starting/stopping Java apps on Linux

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