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Circus Process Watcher

Note

Circus is in its early stages and is not production ready yet !

We still might change the API.

image

Circus is a program that will let you run and watch multiple processes.

Circus can be driven through a command-line interface, or programmatically through its APIs.

It shares some of the goals of Supervisord, BluePill and Daemontools.

To install it, check out installation

Using Circus through the command-line

Circus provides a command-line script that can be used to manage one or more programs. Each program can have one or more running processes.

Circus's command-line tool is configurable using an ini-style configuration file. Here is a minimal example:

[circus]
check_delay = 5
endpoint = tcp://127.0.0.1:5555

[watcher:myprogram]
cmd = python
args = -u myprogram.py $WID
warmup_delay = 0
numprocesses = 5

[watcher:anotherprogram]
cmd = another_program
numprocesses = 2

The file is then run using circusd:

$ circusd example.ini

Circus also provides a management console, circusctl. You can use it to perform actions such as adding or removing workers or to display various statistics.

To learn more about this, see cli

Using Circus as a Library

Circus provides high-level classes and functions that will let you run processes. For example, if you just want to run four workers forever, you can write:

from circus import get_arbiter

arbiter = get_arbiter("myprogram", 4)
try:
    arbiter.start()
finally:
    arbiter.stop()

This snippet will run instances of myprogram and watch them for you, restarting them if they die unexpectedly.

To learn more about this, see library

Why should I use Circus instead of X ?

Here are, in our opinion, the top 3 reasons to use Circus.

  1. Circus provides pub/sub and poll notifications via ZeroMQ

Circus has a pub/sub channel you can subscribe into. This channel receives all events happening in the system. For example, you can get notified everytime a process is flapping, or build a client that triggers a warning when some processes are eating all the CPU or RAM.

These events are sent via a ZeroMQ channel, which makes it different from the stdin stream Supervisord uses for instance:

  • Circus sends events in a fire-and-forget fashion, so there's no need to manually loop through all listeners and maintain their states.
  • Subscribers can be located on a remote host.

Circus also provides ways to get status updates via one time polls on a req/rep channel, so you can get your information without having to subscribe to a stream. The cli command provided in Circus is a client of that channel.

See examples.

  1. Circus is (Python) developer friendly

While Circus can be driven entirely by a config file and the circusctl and circusd commands, it's easy to reuse all or part of the system to build your own custom process watcher in Python.

Every layer of the system is isolated, so you can reuse independantly:

  • the process wrapper (Process)
  • the processes manager (Watcher)
  • the global manager that runs several processes managers (Arbiter)
  • and so on...
  1. Circus scales

One of the use cases of Circus is to be able to manage thousands of processes without having it slowing down -- we're dedicated to focusing on this.

More documentation

installation configuration commands library architecture deployment examples coverage

Contributions and Feedback

You can reach us for any feedback, bug report, or to contribute, at https://github.com/mozilla-services/circus

We can also be found in the #mozilla-circus channel on freenode.net.