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Differences in controlling daemons & applications
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Differences in controlling daemons & applications
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Hi everyone,
With respect to this excellent post:
What's the difference between nohup and a daemon?
I would like to ask the following:
After launching an application from my terminal, the application keeps running either in the background or the foreground and the only thing I can do to interact with it is by sending it signals from my terminal (given that stdin is still in place).
However, after a daemon process is launched, I realized that it can be controlled with other means like querying it or restarting it (arch way):
# /etc/rc.d/daemon-name {start|stop|restart|status|...}
Could someone explain to me if that feature is built-into the general "daemon framework" and applies to every daemon process as a special feature or is it just a provision that processes designed to run as a daemon will have to handle internally?
And to add more to the matter, how on earth are we able to "control" daemons from the terminal using their name (i.e. sambad stop) while applications always have to be referred using their name (i.e. kill -9 1234)?
Thank you in advance!
This is done differently for different daemons. Just look into those files (/etc/rc.d/*) and see how it's done.
On debian most services use start-stop-daemon. PID is stored in a file and start-stop-daemon sends signals to that PID.
Related
I am developing an Linux application using Python3. This application synchronizes the user's file with the cloud. The file are in a specific folder. I want that a process or daemon should run in background and whenever there is a change in that folder, It should start synchronization process.
I have made modules in Python3 for synchronization but I don't know that How to run a process in background which should automatically detect the changes in that folder? This process should always run in background and should be started automatically after boot.
You have actually asked two distinct questions. Both have simple answers and plenty of good resources online, so I'm assuming you simply did not know what to look for.
Running a process in the background is called "daemonization". Search for "writing a daemon in python". This is a standard technique for all Posix based systems.
Monitoring a directory for changes is done through an API set called inotify. This is Linux specific, as each OS has its own solution.
I put this question on stackoverflow, because I found lots of quesions on the topic here already.
Short introduction
Simply put, nohup can be used to run apps in the background and keeps them running after the user logs off or the terminal or ssh session is closed e.g.
There are many example quesitons here on stackoverflow, like this or that.
My question is simple.
Why opt for nohup, when there are options like upstart, systemd, ... which manage the app as service in a much more convenient way (runlevels, ...)?
Reading the many questions on similar topics, the only option seems to be nohup. Almost never the answer is something like: "... use an upstart script, so it is all handled for you..."
I would mainly go with e.g. upstart, except maybe for a quick and dirty test scenario.
Am I missing something important?
nohup is quick, easy, doesn't require root access and doesn't make permanent changes in the system. That's why many people use it (or try to use it) instead of configuring services.
Running things in the background without any supervision is usually a bad idea, although there are many legitimate use cases which don't fit traditional service model. For example:
Background process might be needed only sometimes, after certain user actions.
More than one instance might be needed. For example: one per user or one per session.
Process might not need to to be running all the time. It just quits after doing its job.
Some real world examples (which use something like nohup and would be hard to implement as system services):
git will sometimes run git gc in background to optimize repository without blocking user work
adb will start its service in background and keep it running until user asks to terminate it
Some compilers have option to keep running in the background to reduce startup times of subsequent invocations
Your understanding is correct, the way those questions were asked the natural answer is nohup - upstart would be the answer to a different question such as How to make sure an application keeps running on Linux
Requirements:
I want to run my application on linux in the background (at startup of course).
I want to be able to call start/stop/restart commands directly from console (it have to be simple just like for /etc/init.d - just call simple command directly from console).
I want to be able to call status - and I want that this command will somehow get the actual status of application returned by itself. I thought that I can call some method which returns String or just use stdin to send command but when I do noup .. &, or start-stop-daemon, then the stdin is detached. Is there a simple way to attach stdin back to the application (I've seen that I can create a pipe, but this is pretty complitated). Or what is the best way to communicate with application after it is started as a daemon (I can make a socket and connect through telnet for example, but I am looking for simpler solution and possibility to do it directly from console, without starting telnet first)? Ideally it will be great to get the possibility to send any command, but simple status will be sufficient (but again - it have to communicate with the application to get that status somnehow)
I have found many different answers. Some of them says to simply use nohup and &, and some others says that nohup and & is old fashion. Some answers says to use start-stop-daemon or JSvc (for java). But it seems that none of them will suffice this 3 requirements from me.
So... What are the simplest possibilities for all of 3 requirements to be met?
PS. I don't want to use screen. The application must be run as a linux daemon.
PPS. Application is written in Java but I am looking for generic soluction which is not limited to java.
You should create a command line tool for communicate with a daemon in way you need. The tool itself can use TCP/IP or named pipes.
And then use cli-tool start|stop|restart|status from console.
If you need to start a daemon at startup sequence (before user login) you have to deal with init system (init.d, systemd, OpenRC, etc...).
Dragons be here:
Be sure that init doesn't restart your daemon after manual stop via cli.
Command line tool itself runs with unprivileged user rights, so restart may be hard if first startup script use superuser rights or application-specific user and, especially in case deep init integration, you might have to use sudo cli-tool start.
To avoid this one possible solution is to make wrapper daemon, that runs forever via init and control the underlying application (start-stop) with proper rights.
Cons: Develop two additional tools for a daemon.
Pros: Wrapper daemon can operate as a circuit breaker between superuser/specific user and userspace.
I want to create an application that runs in the background in Linux (daemon) that will basically at set times (5 times) play a music file or any sound given every single day. I want this daemon to start when the computer is started in terminal mode (non-GUI). I want to know if this is possible and if so, What considerations, tools, and programming language would be the most efficient in doing so? This will be a dedicated computer that will only be executing this task, so if any recommendations on how I can maximize efficiency while disabling other features that are not required for this task will be appreciated. Also, could you please explain how processes and tasks work in terminal (non-GUI)? I always thought terminal was something like CMD in Windows and can only run tasks one at a time.
EDIT: I need the sound to run at variable times, I'll be fetching these times from a website. Any suggestions regarding how to achieve this?
Thanks for the help and sorry for any shortcoming in the questions or my research.
Look at using cron to run your tasks. cron is a very flexible scheduling utility built in to most Linux distributions.
Basically, with cron you specify a task to run (your main program, or maybe just a sound-playing program), all of its arguments, and when it runs. cron takes care of running it, and will even send you "mail" if the job produces any output (such as errors).
You can make processes fork into a subprocess of your terminal, i.e. you are able to run more than one task at a time by putting a & after your terminal command:
> cmd&
> [you can type other commands here but the "cmd" program is still running]
However, for services you generally don't have to worry about starting it as a subprocess because the system already knows to do this. Here's a good question from Super User that has an example of a working service. Simply place your service as a shell script in the /etc/init.d and it will be automatically started as a service.
My application is built with three distincts servers: each one of them serves a different purpose and they must stay separated (at least, for using more than one core). As an example (this is not the real thing) you could think about this set up as one server managing user authentication, another one serving as the game engine, another one as a pubsub server. Logically the "application" is only one and clients connect to one or another server depending on their specific need.
Now I'm trying to figure out the best way to run a setup like this in a production environment.
The simplest way could be to have a bash script that would run each server in background one after the other. One problem with this approach would be that in the case I need to restart the "application", I should have saved each server's pid and kill each one.
Another way would be to use a node process that would run each servers as its own child (using child_process.spawn). Node spawning nodes. Is that stupid for some reason? This way I'd have a single process to kill when I need to stop/restart the whole application.
What do you think?
If you're on Linux or another *nix OS, you might try writing an init script that start/stop/restart your application. here's an example.
Use specific tools for process monitoring. Monit for example can monitor your processes by their pid and restart them whenever they die, and you can manually restart each process with the monit-cmd or with their web-gui.
So in your example you would create 3 independent processes and tell monit to monitor each of them.
I ended up creating a wrapper/supervisor script in Node that uses child_process.spawn to execute all three processes.
it pipes each process stdout/stderr to the its stdout/stderr
it intercepts errors of each process, logs them, then exit (as it were its fault)
It then forks and daemonize itself
I can stop the whole thing using the start/stop paradigm.
Now that I have a robust daemon, I can create a unix script to start/stop it on boot/shutdown as usual (as #Levi says)
See also my other (related) Q: NodeJS: will this code run multi-core or not?