Set nginx init script to never run automatically on startup

Question

I just installed nginx on Ubuntu 16.04. The trouble is, I only want to start it manually, never automatically on runlevel.

I found lots of entries about how to get it to run on different runlevels, but not to prevent running on all of them.

So, I guessed and did this:

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:   nginx
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
# Default-Start:
# Default-Stop:      0 1 2 3 4 5 6
# Short-Description: starts the nginx web server
# Description:       starts nginx using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

Then:

/etc/init.d$ sudo update-rc.d nginx defaults
insserv: warning: current start runlevel(s) (2 3 4 5) of script `nginx' overrides LSB defaults (empty).
insserv: warning: current stop runlevel(s) (0 1 6) of script `nginx' overrides LSB defaults (0 1 2 3 4 5 6).

which looks to me like my changes didn't work.

How do I shut this off?

Answer 1

This answer assumes you are using the default init system in 16.04, which is SystemD.

Borrowing from DigitalOcean's SystemD guide, you can disable nginx autoboot with this:

sudo systemctl disable nginx.service

This should disable autostart of the service at boot like the older update-rc.d functionality provided. (Note that with SystemD, update-rc.d isn't going to be as useful)