I want to be able to start and stop an nginx server on an Ubuntu EC2 instance with Fabric. I have this two scripts in my fabfile.py: def start_nginx(): sudo('/etc/init.d/nginx start') #also tried this: run('sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start') def stop_nginx(): sudo('/etc/init.d/nginx stop') The start_nginx() seemingly runs without errors (* Starting Nginx Server.../ ...done.) but doesn't start the server (or it dies immediately). If I SSH into the instance this starts nginx perfectly: sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start The stop_nginx() Fabric script stops the server remotely. I compiled nginx from source, using this http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.1.9.tar.gz and using this script in /etc/init.d: https://github.com/JasonGiedymin/nginx-init-ubuntu/blob/master/nginx. The only thing I modified is this line: DAEMON=/usr/local/sbin/nginx to DAEMON=/usr/sbin/nginx because that's the path I used when I ./configure-d my compile. Does anyone have any idea why the init script behaves differently being called from Fabric?