macos - Run Python Script at OS X Startup

Question

I am very new to python as well as MAC OSX. For my academic project I need to download a bunch of tweets from twitter using twitter streaming API. I need to download atleast 5000000 tweets. So I have written a python script and placed it in start-up. "System Preference -> Users and Groups -> Login items" and added my script there. But I see that the script is not executed when I login to the system ! Please help me resolve this issue.

Answer 1

Adapt the following accordingly, name it something like myscript_launcher.plist, and put it in either one of three locations: /System/Library/LaunchAgents, /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, /Users/<username>/Library/LaunchAgents.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>my.python.script.name</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/path/to/python</string>
        <string>/path/to/python/script.py</string>
    </array>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/python_script.error</string>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Also, let's assume you put the plist file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents. You can start and stop it with the launchctl. To start, use launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/myscript_launcher.plist. To stop it, do the same but use the unload argument