SafeFlock

Thread-safe, transferable, flock-based file lock.

This helper solves mutual exclusion within niche constraints:

• A parent process must acquire a lock and transfer it to a child process.
• The parent may terminate before the child.
• Locks may be created within threads within the parent.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'safe_flock'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install safe_flock

Usage

Simple example:

require "safe_flock"

SafeFlock.create("/var/run/myapp/myapp.lck") do
  # ... mutually excluded processing
end

The use case for which the helper was created:

require "safe_flock"

SafeFlock.create("/var/run/myapp/myapp.lck") do
  child = fork do
    # ... mutually excluded processing
  end
end
Process.detach(child)

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/starjuice/safe_flock.