Titan helps you creating daemon threads, that can be accessed later on. On the one side it creates daemons that run in the background and don't stop if the current process exits. On the other side it manages created daemon threads and provides functionality for accessing them later on by a custom id.

First, you've to install the gem

gem install titan

and require it

require "titan"

Creating a new daemon thread using Titan is pretty easy. First, you've create a new Titan::Thread object and then call its #run method:

thread = Titan::Thread.new do
  # here comes the programm
  sleep(15)
  puts "I'm awake!"
end
thread.run

Furthermore you can pass an id to each created thread that can be used for identification in the future:

Titan::Thread.new(:id => "my_new_thread") do
  sleep(15)
  puts "I'm awake!"
end.run

It's also possible to change the identifier after creation and while the thread is running:

thread = Titan::Thread.new do
  1+1
end.run
thread.id = "my_new_thread"

The identifier must be unique.

Titan manages created threads and saves them in pid files inside of a .titan_threads directory that can be found in your home folder.

You can easily list all available threads:

Titan::Thread.all

By using the Thread class you can find currently managed threads by using their identifier:

thread  = Titan::Thread.find("my_new_thread")

A thread can be forced to exit:

thread.kill if thread.alive?

If you want to remove threads from Titan, that aren't running any longer, you can do this by:

Titan::Thread.remove_dead_threads

Furthermore, you can check if a single thread is alive:

thread = Titan::Thread.find("my_new_thread")
thread.alive? # returns true or false

The thread's memory and CPU usage is available by

thread.used_memory

and

thread.used_cpu

You can print the status of all threads managed by Titan on the command line:

titan status

• Ruby 1.8.7 or higher
• Linux or Mac OS X

Please report bugs at http://github.com/flippingbits/titan/issues.

• Fork the project from http://github.com/flippingbits/titan.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Stefan Sprenger. See LICENSE for details.