Disable autostart for a service without uninstalling?

Question

How can I disable autostart for a service without uninstalling? For example, I'd like to leave tomcat installed, but I don't want it turning on every time I restart.

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

Open terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and enter the following command:

sudo update-rc.d tomcat disable

Basically update-rc.d will modify existing runlevel links for the script /etc/init.d/tomcat by renaming start links to stop links.

Answer 2

More generic and more visual, with a nice UI: sysv-rc-conf

Uncheck the boxes for tomcat7 (runlevels 2 to 5), quit and that's it.

Answer 3

The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future. I suggest you use the following command to remove all the symlinks in /etc/rc?.d/:

update-rc.d -f tomcat remove

Answer 4

For upstart jobs, you need to disable service like this (e.g. mysql):

$ sudo -s
# echo "manual" > /etc/init/mysql.override
# exit

or using this one-liner:

$ echo "manual" | sudo tee /etc/init/mysql.override > /dev/null