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Ask HN: How do you manage startup processes/scripts on your servers?

2 points by nerva ↗ HN
So here's my situation:

I have tmux running on my server, with ~5 windows, things like gunicorn, syncthing, custom scripts, etc. I really like to see whats being written to STDOUT and being able to kill the process/restart it manually if necessary.

I open all these things manually right now, which if my server went down I'd be screwed hard until I noticed.

So is there some way to open tmux on startup with my processes so if something happens I don't have to worry?

Or a better way to accomplish the same thing? How do do you guys/ladies do this?

3 comments

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DanielDent
Ugly hack: Use a cron job with "@reboot" as the time.

Better: Start your processes with systemd or another supervisor. You can restart them manually, view their output using journalctl, ...

liw
This. Running services under screen or tmux is a kludge at best. For unimportant or personal things, fine, but for any serious services, it's not the way to go.
zbuf
Other posters are right, that services should really be started as services. I have a piece of code which turns any basic foreground app into a daemon, with logging and auto-restarts and it's great for node.js and similar. Time being available I'd like to share this online sometime.

As for your specific situation, I do something similar but with screen not tmux. A cron job with @reboot, and then a screenrc file starts each terminal with the appropriate application. This is good for systems such as realtime audio processors which have a live display, which straddle the line a little between a daemon and interactive application.