ProcLaunch v1.2

15 April 2011

Just a few bug fixes this time:

• When you send proclaunch SIGHUP, it will send all of the profiles their respective stop signals and then wait for them to shut down. You can tell proclaunch to stop without waiting by sending SIGHUP again.
• You can pass the --log-path command line option to change where proclaunch writes it's log. By default this is $profile_dir/error.log

Tagged: Programming  Proclaunch 

ProcLaunch Improvements and v1.1

4 March 2011

ProcLaunch has learned a bunch of new things lately. I've fixed a few bugs and implemented a few new features, including:

• A --log-level option, so you can set a level other than DEBUG
• Kill profiles that don't exist
• Instead of killing the process and restarting, proclaunch can send it a signal using the reload file
• Instead of always sending SIGTERM, the stop_signal file can contain the name of a signal to send when proclaunch wants to stop a profile
• Pid files are properly cleaned up after processes that don't do it themselves
• You won't get two copies of proclaunch if one is already running as root

Tagged: Programming  Proclaunch 

ProcLaunch v1.0

23 September 2010

I kind of started [ProcLaunch][] as a lark. Can I actually do better than the existing user space process managers? It turns out that at least a few people think so. I've gotten a ton of great feedback from thijsterlouw, who actually filed bug reports and helped me work through a bunch of issues. ProcLaunch even has some tests now!

Tagged: Programming  Proclaunch 

Managing Your Processes with ProcLaunch.

8 August 2010

Edit 2010-08-08: ProcLaunch now has a CPAN-compatible install process. See below for details.

I finally got the chance to work some more on proclaunch, my implementation of a user space process manager, like runit or mongrel or god. I wrote up a big overview of the currently available options [previously][12], but in summary: all of the existing options suck. They're either hard to setup, have memory leaks, have a weird configuration language, or are just plain strange. The only viable option was procer, and even that was just sort of a tech demo put together for the Mongrel2 manual.

That's why I started putting together proclaunch. I need some of the features of runit, namely automatic restart, with none of the wackyness, and I wanted it to be easy to automatically configure. I also wanted it to be standalone so I wouldn't have to install a pre-alpha version of Mongrel2 just to manage my own processes.

Tagged: Programming  Proclaunch 

Daemons are Our Picky, Temperamental Friends

1 August 2010

Modern web applications are complicated beasts. They've got database processes, web serving processes, and various tiers of actual application services. The first two generally take care of themselves. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, they all have well-understood ways of starting and keeping themselves up and running.

But what do you do if you have a bunch of processes that you need to keep running that aren't well understood? What if they're well-understood to crash once in a while and you don't want to have to babysit them? You need a user space process manager. Zed Shaw seems to have coined this term specifically for the Mongrel2 manual, and it describes pretty accurately what you'd want: some user-space program running above init that can launch your processes and start them again if they stop. Dropping privilages would be nice. Oh, and it'd be cool if it were sysadmin-friendly. Oh, and if it could automatically detect code changes and restart that'd be nifty too.

Tagged: Programming  Perl  Proclaunch