daemon-spawn¶ ↑

• github.com/alexvollmer/daemon-spawn

Daemon launching and management made dead simple.

With daemon-spawn you can start, stop and restart processes that run in the background. Processed are tracked by a simple PID file written to disk.

In addition, you can choose to either execute ruby in your daemonized process or ‘exec’ another process altogether (handy for wrapping other services).

To create a new spawner, write a class that extends DaemonSpawn::Base and provides start and stop methods. For example:

class MyServer < DaemonSpawn::Base

  def start(args)
    # process command-line args
    # start your bad self
  end

  def stop
    # stop your bad self
  end
end

MyServer.spawn!(:log_file => '/var/log/echo_server.log',
                :pid_file => '/var/run/echo_server.pid',
                :sync_log => true,
                :working_dir => File.dirname(__FILE__))

If you need command-line parameters, any arguments passed after one of the commands (start, stop, status or restart) will be passed to the start method.

The spawn! method takes a hash of symbolized keys. At a minimum you must specify the :working_dir option. You can also override the default locations for the log and PID files.

If you pass a :processes option to the spawn!, daemon spawn will start that number of processes.

See the test/servers directory for working examples.

Let’s say that you have the example script listed above in bin/my_server. Here are the commands for starting, querying the status, restarting and stopping the daemon:

bin/my_server start
bin/my_server status
bin/my_server restart
bin/my_server stop

Note that if any additional arguments are passed to either start or restart those will be passed to the start method of an instance of your daemon class.

None!

Feel free to fork this project and send me pull requests with any changes that you have. Please note that I won’t accept any patches with significant formatting changes or ones without tests.

• sudo gem install daemon-spawn

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2009 Evri, Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.