This past few months I’ve set up a few beta projects on a single Debian server, and now it has become a tedious task typing the command to start|restart|stop paste for each project everytime I push new code. So I decide it to create a init script to simplify things.
For this I’ve my virtual environment installed inside the project folder. Make sure to replace virtual-env whit the name of your virtual environment folder and ProjectName with the name of your project folder. Here’s how it looks:

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          paster
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the paster server
# Description:       starts paster
### END INIT INFO
PROJECT=/var/www/ProjectName
PID_DIR=/opt/nginx/logs/ProjectName/
PID_FILE=/opt/nginx/logs/ProjectName/paster.pid
LOG_FILE=/opt/nginx/logs/ProjectName/paster.log
USER=root
GROUP=root
PROD_FILE=/var/www/ProjectName/production.ini
RET_VAL=0
cd $PROJECT
case "$1" in
start)
virtual-env/bin/paster  serve \
--daemon \
--pid-file=$PID_FILE \
--log-file=$LOG_FILE \
--user=$USER \
--group=$GROUP \
$PROD_FILE \
start
;;
stop)
virtual-env/bin/paster  serve \
--daemon \
--pid-file=$PID_FILE \
--log-file=$LOG_FILE \
--user=$USER \
--group=$GROUP \
$PROD_FILE \
stop
;;
restart)
virtual-env/bin/paster  serve \
--daemon \
--pid-file=$PID_FILE \
--log-file=$LOG_FILE \
--user=$USER \
--group=$GROUP \
$PROD_FILE \
restart
;;
*)
echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
exit 1
esac

So now I can save this file as projectname-paster and move it to /etc/init.d/ and start it with:

sudo /etc/init.d/projectname-paster start | restart | stop