Will writes

I’m running a Rails3 app under daemontools, this is how I did it.

First, install then start daemontools and Unicorn. This is left as an exercise for the reader, it was easy under CentOS 5. You should end up with a /service directory on your server.

Run “mkdir /service/my_service_name && cd /service/my_service_name && ls”. If you have the right processes running you should have a “supervise” subdirectory automatically created for you under your new directory.

You should be in the “/service/my_service_name” directory. In order to get anything to run you need to create a “run” script. Here’s mine, you can copy and modify it for your own use. If you’re running Unicorn and you improve the script I’d appreciate feedback in the comments:

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/www/foo/current && unicorn_rails -E staging -c /home/www/foo/shared/config/unicorn.conf

Make sure the script is executable. If you have done everything right you should have a Unicorn process running. You should see something similar to this in the output of “ps auxww -H”:

If that’s not the sort of thing you see, check the logs. Lastly I added this cap snippet to kill the process on deploy and let supervise handle re-spawning it:

Done!

Why daemontools?

There is some propaganda on the daemontools site, but I used it because it’s quick to get going and in my experience reliable. I use monit a lot at Engine Yard, but there are no recent monit packages easily available for CentOS that I have found. One drawback is that you don’t get any of the resource monitoring that monit provides, such as http checks, memory checks etc. You’d have to implement this yourself, but in this instance that’s the tradeoff you make for simplicity.

CentOS 5 update:

If you get an error that looks like this:

Follow these instructions to fix the issue: