Proclaunch is a super simple pure-perl user space process manager. It starts your processes and keeps them running. It's comparable to runit, except it manages processes that know how to daemonize themselves. It's also only a few hundred lines of simple perl with minimal dependencies.

$ git clone git://github.com/peterkeen/proclaunch.git
$ cd proclaunch
$ perl Build.PL
$ ./Build install

$ proclaunch [state directory] [profile directory]

When executed, proclaunch will daemonize itself and write it's pid file to $state_directory/proclaunch.pid.

The profile directory should contain a series of directories, each of which describes a process to be managed via a set of specially named files:

• pid_file contains the path to the file where run will place it's pid

• run is an executable script that will daemonize itself and write it's pid to the path in pid_file

• restart is an optional empty file who's presence tells proclaunch to restart run if it dies.

• user is an optional file containing the user name that should execute run. Only effective if proclaunch has been run as root.

Initially, proclaunch will launch all profiles contained in the profile directory. When a profile exits and the restart file exists, the profile will be restarted. Additionally, proclaunch will scan every second to see if either an individual profile directory has changed, been added, or disappeared. Added profiles will be started, removed profiles will be stopped with SIGTERM, and changed profiles will be restarted. Changes are determined by comparing file stats of the above set of files, not the directory as a whole.

Proclaunch daemonizes itself by default, so the easiest thing to do is add a line to crontab:

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/proclaunch /var/run/proclaunch /path/to/your/profiles/directory

Proclaunch is idempotent, meaning if it's already running it'll silently exit. This cron entry ensures that it will be restarted if it falls over for any reason.

If you have bug reports, please use the Github issue tracker. If you have something to contribute, fork proclaunch and send me a pull request :)