Unicorn Signal Handling Shared for Other Servers

Unicorn Signal Handling Shared for Other Servers

[Ben Curren]

I was curious if anyone has attempted to, or is interested, it ripping
out Unicorn's signal handling and daemon code to make it possible to
share with other Ruby Servers. I really love have 0 down time deploys
and would love to have this in workling, thrift or other custom
servers we have written. I'm more than willing to fork the code and
take stab at it but wanted to check with the group to see if something
has already been attempted. I'm not the type who likes to reinvent the
wheel.

-- 
Ben Curren
CoFounder
Outright.com

Blog: blog.outright.com
Twitter: twitter.com/bcurren
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Re: Unicorn Signal Handling Shared for Other Servers

[Eric Wong]

Ben Curren <ben@outright.com> wrote:
> I was curious if anyone has attempted to, or is interested, it ripping
> out Unicorn's signal handling and daemon code to make it possible to
> share with other Ruby Servers. I really love have 0 down time deploys
> and would love to have this in workling, thrift or other custom
> servers we have written. I'm more than willing to fork the code and
> take stab at it but wanted to check with the group to see if something
> has already been attempted. I'm not the type who likes to reinvent the
> wheel.

Hi Ben,

I recall some attempts to make libraries around what Unicorn did a year
ago when Unicorn started picking up more press.  I'm not sure how far
any of them got and can't remember the names, but October/November 2009
was the time frame.

Personally, I think the core Ruby methods around Unix APIs are
"just right" and extra wrappers either:

  a) take away needed flexibility
     (no, I don't want umask 0000 with my daemonize())

  b) require as much effort to learn as the Unix APIs
     (Process.daemon() in 1.9, really?)

The Unix APIs themselves are well-documented in manpages, textbooks,
and needless to say, useful outside of Ruby[1].

Ruby already does a great job of hiding the tedious, more painful parts
of the original C APIs from you.  Things like trap(signal, &block),
IO.select, and exceptions (vs writing error check for *everything*)
already make life much easier than before.


For Unicorn (and Rainbows!) development, one huge (maybe the biggest)
factor in trusting it is having integration tests that
start/stop/restart/thrash/nuke the server in various ways a user would.
The test suite hits signal handling logic, directory changes, process
creation/reaping, log file rotation, pid files, etc.  Some parts of the
test suite are ugly (test_exec.rb), but nevertheless effective at
finding bugs.


[1] - I'll admit to being reasonably experienced with Unix programming
      and worked on several daemons before I picked up Ruby.

-- 
Eric Wong
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