Single start and restart command (start if not running, restart if running)

[julien-c]

I might have overlooked something, but is there a way to restart a script if it's already running, and start it otherwise?

I'm having this need in a deploy script I wrote for Meteor.

Thanks!

[julien-c]

Anyone? Thanks in advance for your help!

[flovilmart]

The restart should not fail if the process is not running in the first instance

[tuomassalo]

I agree with @vfloz: restart should do start if the process is not running. That would be identical to traditional UNIX daemon behavior. Any chances for this to be fixed?

(I ran into this problem when migrating an old service to use forever. Something is calling it with restart and expects is to start if not running.)

[sheldonh]

Any maintainer opinion? A way to start if not running and restart if running sounds like a great feature for deployment scripts.

[noazark]

start exits with a non zero code (I think its 1) if the process is already running so a simple forever start || forever restart should do the job right? The production init script my company uses to deploy apps has a restart method that looks something like this:

restart() {
  if [ "$foreverid" != "" ]; then
    forever restart $foreverid
  else
    forever start $script
  fi
}

I much prefer handling the (re)starting myself.

[indexzero]

👍 will go into forever@1.0.0 since it is breaking.

[markstos]

As a forever user, I'm going to be looking at solving this with systemd as a process manager in the future. systemd features three levels of off to help address is. In addition to stopping a service, you can also "disable" it. Further, systemd offers a try-restart command, which is explicitly designed to only restart a service that's already running.

If forever adds this feature, I recommend that's also called try-restart to follow the same pattern.

[julien-c]

For potential reference, this works fine:

forever restart $SCRIPT || forever start $SCRIPT