lifeline

Methods for creating lifeline tasks. This allows you to write cron jobs that restart processes that die while ensuring the code is only executing only once (avoiding the duplication that sometimes happens using the ‘daemons’) gem. Both a generic lifeline method is provided as well as methods to create 3 lifeline rake tasks for managing lifelines.

The Lifeline Approach

For all their history, daemons can be problematic. For starters, mechanisms for restarting daemons that have failed often rely on a third-party application like monit which is itself a daemon. In addition, PID-based mechanisms to ensure only one daemon is running at a time fail in both ways, sometimes preventing a daemon from starting up and other times not preventing multiple instances from running.

The lifeline pattern (originally presented to me by Matt Todd of Highgroove Studios) is a different approach that uses a cron job that runs every minute as a lifeline to restart the daemon process if it has died. This lifeline calls ps to see if another instance of the same command is already running. If it is, the lifeline exits immediately. Otherwise, it stays running indefinitely (Cron starts all jobs via a fork, so it can run forever without stalling out cron). The trick is figuring out the right invocation to ps to ensure you are only checking for apps with the same name. But the lifeline gem handles all this to you.

Although lifelines can work well for processes that run forever, the technique can also be used to safeguard any code you only want to run a single instance of at a time (eg, if you have a cron job that runs every 5 minutes and you want to ensure it doesn’t run 2 processes should the first cron job get delayed.)

How a Lifeline Works

More specifically, the lifeline method (and rake task that calls it) does the following steps:

Get a list of all running processes
Find the name of the current process by looking for the command associated with the current process id (the $$ variable)
If there is another process with the same command string, return and exit
Otherwise yield to run the passed block.

Note that you do not pass a command name to the lifeline, it uses the command of the process invoking the Lifeline code. This means if you call lifeline code simultaneously from a Rake task and a Rails process, it will be executed in both cases (it’s NOT a mutex or semaphore). Also, this mechanism uses a global namespace. means you will want to give unique names to the processes that ultimately invoke your lifeline code. If app1 and app2 both have a rake task named “lifeline,” they will interfere with each other (“app1:lifeline” and “app2:lifeline” are much better).

Examples

Lifeline.lifeline do
  # some code you want to run in only a single process
end

Lifeline.define_lifeline_tasks("appname") do
  # some code you want to run in a single lifeline
end

> rake -T appname
rake appname:lifeline   # A lifeline task for executing only one process of appname:run at a time
rake appname:run        # Runs the appname:run task
rake appname:terminate  # Terminates any running appname:lifeline tasks

Installation

gem install lifeline

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Contributors

Matt Todd
Jacob Harris
Ben Koski