taskforce 0.6.0

Taskforce starts and restarts daemon processes. It will detect executable and/or module changes and automatically restart the affected processes.

This supports python 2.7 and python 3 on Unix derivatives. It has specific support for select.kqueue on MacOS and *BSD and the inotifyx bindings for Linux inotify. If neither of these facilities is available, taskforce operates in polling mode which adds some latency and processing overhead but is functionally the same.

Commands to be run are defined in a configuration file in YAML format. Let’s go straight to a quick example:

{
    "tasks": {
        "sshd": {
            "control": "wait",
            "commands": { "start": [ "/usr/sbin/sshd", "-D" ] }
        },
        "ntpd": {
            "control": "wait",
            "requires": "sshd",
            "defines": { "conf": "/etc/ntp.conf" },
            "commands": { "start": [ "/usr/sbin/ntpd", "-c", "{conf}", "-n"] },
            "events": [
                { "type": "self", "command": "stop" },
                { "type": "file_change", "path": "{conf}", "command": "stop" }
            ]
        }
    }
}

In this example, taskforce starts sshd and then starts ntpd. taskforce is set to wait on both programs and both programs are started so that they will not detach themselves. If either program exits, it will be restarted.

ntpd is run with a couple of extra features. First, it defines a tag for the configuration file name. This is convenient for when the element is used in multiple places. It also adds two events. The first fires if the executable file changes, and the second fires if the configuration file changes. The event type self is shorthand for the equivalent file_change event. In both cases, the event will cause the task to be stopped. As the task has the wait control, it will be immediately restarted.

Visit https://github.com/akfullfo/taskforce/ for more information.