Making an app run at system startup

[jergosh]

Hello again,
I googled for a way to make my app run at Windows startup and it seems that there are several ways to do it:

- add an appropriate key to the registry
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Coo.../Recipe/174627
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/...rtup_0401.html (VB specific but a good description anyway)

- add a shortcut (.lnk file) to Program Files/Autostart
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pyt...er/015874.html

Which is the best method? I always thought of Autostart as a place for the user to manually add shortcuts and I don't particularly fancy messing with the registry by hand. I expected where would be some simple, ready-made way to do what I want (WinAPI?) but I can't seem to find any.

TIA,
Greg

[borthouth]

If you don't want it to run on startup you can always run a PY file as a service.

If its a windows machine search "srvany" in google, but if you get into trouble and need an example I can provide you with one.

[bartonc]

Hello again,
I googled for a way to make my app run at Windows startup and it seems that there are several ways to do it:

- add an appropriate key to the registry
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Coo.../Recipe/174627
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/...rtup_0401.html (VB specific but a good description anyway)

- add a shortcut (.lnk file) to Program Files/Autostart
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pyt...er/015874.html

Which is the best method? I always thought of Autostart as a place for the user to manually add shortcuts and I don't particularly fancy messing with the registry by hand. I expected where would be some simple, ready-made way to do what I want (WinAPI?) but I can't seem to find any.

TIA,
Greg

I've always preferred to use the startup directory/shortcut, myself.

The ASPN recipe that you link to is quite old. These days there is the _winreg module for such tasks.

instacalKey = _winreg.OpenKey(_winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
                            "SOFTWARE\Universal Library")
self.pmdPath = str(_winreg.QueryValueEx(instacalKey, 'RootDir')[0])

Here are the docs: 22.2 _winreg - Windows registry access.