Process boss is a tiny supervisor program.
Features:
- Running programs and restarting on crash
- Setting environment, uid, chroot, scheduling, affinity without running tons of external utilities
- Opening files and providing them as file descriptors (useful to bind to tcp port < 1024 or for fastcgi programs)
- Fast restart in case of crash (reaping SIGCHLD)
- Control interface throught fifo to stop/restart processes
- User-friendly and featureful configuration in yaml
- Bash and Zsh completion for remote control utilities
- Logging of process deaths and restarts
- Running multiple similar processes, optionally keeping some shared file descriptor open. Dynamically adding processed.
- In case it's not clear from above, can act as spawn-fcgi
- Tagging processed for easier managing, like restart all processes of some project
Will never happen:
- Monitoring memory, cpu, whatever (there are better tools, e.g. collectd)
- Being replacement for init
- Networking
- Other bloat
Bugs:
We currently use environment variables for all the process tracking, which have the following implications:
- it doesn't work for some programs trying to mangle own environment like nginx (althrought nginx has it's own supervisor)
- it's not totally secure, any bossd child can imitate other child, by modifing environment, blocking that one to restart in case of crash (this vulnerability is tradeoff of being very robust, and it's quite hard to exploit for our setup, but you have been warned!)
Runtime dependencies:
- linux kernel 2.6.27 (needs signalfd)
- libyaml
Build dependencies:
- python3
- coyaml
- docutils (for python3)
Basic workflow is the following:
git clone git://github.com/tailhook/procboss.git
cd procboss
git submodule update --init
./waf configure --prefix=/usr
./waf build
sudo ./waf install