Check to see if python script is running

Question

I have a python daemon running as a part of my web app/ How can I quickly check (using python) if my daemon is running and, if not, launch it?

I want to do it that way to fix any crashes of the daemon, and so the script does not have to be run manually, it will automatically run as soon as it is called and then stay running.

How can i check (using python) if my script is running?

Answer 1

There are a myriad of options. One method is using system calls or python libraries that perform such calls for you. The other is simply to spawn out a process like:

ps ax | grep processName

and parse the output. Many people choose this approach, it isn't necessarily a bad approach in my view.

Answer 2

There are very good packages for restarting processes on UNIX. One that has a great tutorial about building and configuring it is monit. With some tweaking you can have a rock solid proven technology keeping up your daemon.

Answer 3

Drop a pidfile somewhere (e.g. /tmp). Then you can check to see if the process is running by checking to see if the PID in the file exists. Don't forget to delete the file when you shut down cleanly, and check for it when you start up.

#/usr/bin/env python

import os
import sys

pid = str(os.getpid())
pidfile = "/tmp/mydaemon.pid"

if os.path.isfile(pidfile):
    print "%s already exists, exiting" % pidfile
    sys.exit()
else:
    file(pidfile, 'w').write(pid)

# Do some actual work here

os.unlink(pidfile)

Then you can check to see if the process is running by checking to see if the contents of /tmp/mydaemon.pid are an existing process. Monit (mentioned above) can do this for you, or you can write a simple shell script to check it for you using the return code from ps.

ps up `cat /tmp/mydaemon.pid ` >/dev/null && echo "Running" || echo "Not running"

For extra credit, you can use the atexit module to ensure that your program cleans up its pidfile under any circumstances (when killed, exceptions raised, etc.).

Answer 4

I'm a big fan of Supervisor for managing daemons. It's written in Python, so there are plenty of examples of how to interact with or extend it from Python. For your purposes the XML-RPC process control API should work nicely.