How would I make this program start up automatically?

Until recently, the approach would be to write an init script and install it as part of application installation. Of course not all distros are LSB compliant so custom futzing may be necessary.

Now with some distributions moving to systemd, this may not be the right way to do things for those distros (supposedly systemd will interpret an LSB init script, but in practice… seems tricky). You may be better off writing a service file for those.

I don't have first-hand experience so can't provide guidance on the easiest way to approach things. My impression is this will be an ugly task no matter which path you take and all you can do is minimize the pain. But then I'm a pessimist.

I create a script like /etc/init.d/myscript.sh then run:

update-rc.d myscript.sh defaults

Thank you for your help.

Will it run as root? The program I am making blocks malicious domains in the hosts file. Is there a way to make it not run as root, in case I make a program that does not need to be root?

I typed this into Google "ubuntu 14.04 updaterc.d" and the second link seems to do what you want in the latter case:

http://mobiarch.wordpress.com/2014/05/1 … ntu-14-04/">http://mobiarch.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/creating-an-init-script-in-ubuntu-14-04/