Deploying Notes on Debian

Now that we have the Notes application protected with user authentication, it's more safe to deploy it to a public server. So far we've been running the server application on the command line. This is great for debugging and development, but horrible for deployment on a real server for real users.

Before we get started, it's worth pointing out that the Notes application takes minimal precautions against attacks. It probably has many vulnerabilities, and the passwords are not securely stored.

The normal best practice is to start a background process (daemon) to manage the server process. Unfortunately, the specifics of this vary widely, from one operating system to another.

The traditional way is that the init daemon manages background processes using scripts in the /etc/init.d directory. On Fedora and Red Hat that's still the process, but other operating systems use other daemon managers, such as upstart or launchd. Generally speaking, these scripts start a background...