Autostarting Zope

When you first install Plone/Zope on Linux, you stop and start the Zope server by going to the zope/bin directory and running the zopectl script:

./zopectl start
or
./zopectl stop

This is all right to begin with, but what you really want is for Zope to start up automatically when the machine boots up. One way to do this is to edit the /etc/rc.local file and add a line such as:

su <zopeuser> -c "<path>/zope/bin/zopectl start"

For example:
su joe -c "/usr/local/zope/bin/zopectl start"

The su command switches to the specified user (in the above example joe). This is the user that zope is configured to run as. Typically, you will run the Zope server as a non-root user.

su <user> -c <command> means run the following single command as the specified user.