restarter 0.3

Automatic service restart after updates

restarter

restarter is a little utility to restart services if referenced objects like executables or shared libraries have changed on disk. The aim is to ensure that all services run current versions of their software. This is important for example after security updates.

Usage

restarter takes a pidfile as required argument. If the service is stale, that means there are replaced objects still held in memory, restarter executes the restart command passed via the –restart option:

restarter --restart "/etc/init.d/atd restart" /var/run/atd.pid

There is also the possibility to speficy a “hard restart” command that is executed if the regular restart command fails.

See the output of restarter –help for a list of all supported options.

Stopped Services

Stopped services are gracefully ignored: restarter does nothing if the pidfile does not exist or the pid referenced therein is not running. This behaviour can be modified with the –fail option. Note that restarter always fails when the service was running but did not come up again after restart.

Release History

0.3 (2011-02-16)

• –exclude/-x specifies mmap’ed objects to ignore.

• Add a little bit of documentation in README.txt.

0.2 (2011-02-14)

• Packaging issues.

0.1b1

• Initial public release.