Autorespawn

Autorespawn is an implementation of the popular autoreload scheme, which reloads Ruby program files when they change, but instead execs/spawns the underlying program again. This avoids common issues related to the load mechanism.

Require all the files you need autorespawn to watch and then do

Autorespawn.run do
   # Add the program's functionality here
end

If you touch ARGV and $0, you will want to pass the program and arguments explicitely

Autorespawn.run 'program', 'argument0', 'argument1' do
end

The main usage I designed this gem for was to implement an autotest scheme that does not use #load, and that does restart tests whose dependencies are changed (autotest only looks for the test files). That means a few 100 subcommands that need to be spawned and managed. Not really feasible without some kind of manager behind the scene.

Autorespawn can be started used in master/slave mode. Some processes would be spawning new subcommands by registering them with the Autorespawn#add_slave method, while other are workers. In my autotest prototype, the same script is called in both cases, only the codepaths are different:

manager = Autorespawn.new
if build_axis.empty? == 1
    manager.run do
        # Perform the work
    end
else
    build_axis.each do |cmdline|
        manager.add_slave(*cmdline)
    end
    manager.run
end

It is safe to use this scheme recursively. Slaves who call #add_slave will simply pass the request to the master.

Manage the dependency between slaves that called add_slave and these slaves, i.e. auto-remove the level 2 slaves when the level 1 changes and is respawned.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'autorespawn'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install autorespawn

TODO: Write usage instructions here

After checking out the repo, run bundle install to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/doudou/autorespawn.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.