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I'm a web developer by day and a lot of the software I install on my computer (namely databases and web servers) come with an optional LaunchAgent to automate starting/stopping processes on boot. I'm wondering if there's a GUI for these types of services so I can use the LaunchAgent, then kill the services gracefully. Another great feature would be if I could turn off boot on launch and just use the LaunchAgent to start/stop a service as needed.

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Try booting in single user mode some time and firing up jobs by hand using launchctl. It's so much nicer than the old days and you can really learn how things work. – bmike♦ Aug 2 '11 at 16:14

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Lingon (MAS link)

It provides a nice GUI for creating daemons/agents, without writing plist file by yourself. You can also use it to delete daemons/agents that you don't want.

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But I don't think it stops and starts processes - see its suggestion to logout/reboot after making a change – Mark Aug 2 '11 at 9:10
It won't load and unload the jobs - but you can easily do that from terminal by dragging the name of the agent from Lingon to the terminal. The start launchctl command is also nice for testing. – bmike♦ Aug 2 '11 at 16:13
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launchAgents are there to run in the background in conjunction with their respective Daemon, i.e. they have no GUI but you can load & unload them using terminal using:

launchctl unload -S Aqua /Library/launchAgents/"launchAgent's name"

"lanuchAgent's name" : enter the file name of the Agent you want to load/unload. /Library/launchAgents in OS X that is the default folder for Agents to load just replace unload with load

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If in /Library they will probably need to run with sudo – Mark Aug 2 '11 at 8:20
if you are logged in as a privileged user you don't need to, you need to use sudo if you want to un/load the daemon – Samantha Catania Aug 2 '11 at 8:30
The OP seems to be looking specifically for GUI to control loading and unloading - not how launchd works in the command line. Good information, but not relevant to this topic. – bmike♦ Aug 2 '11 at 18:25

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