By default, supervisorctl communicates with supervisord using a unix socket. This socket is only accessible to root. If you want to be able to run supervisorctl as a normal user, and thus allow the starting and stopping of individual services as that normal user, you need to change this to …

Here's an init.d script for starting supervisord at boot:

# Supervisord auto-start
#
# description: Auto-starts supervisord
# processname: supervisord
# pidfile: /var/run/supervisord.pid

SUPERVISORD=/usr/bin/supervisord
SUPERVISORCTL=/usr/bin/supervisorctl

case $1 in
start)
        echo -n "Starting supervisord: "
        $SUPERVISORD
        echo
        ;;
stop)
        echo -n "Stopping supervisord: "
        $SUPERVISORCTL shutdown
        echo
        ;;
restart)
        echo -n …

Now that we know the basics of supervisord (http://drumcoder.co.uk/blog/2010/nov/24/supervisord-basics/), we can put it to work starting gunicorn.

Here's the basic configuration you'll need for a gunicorn server:

[program:bbr]
command=gunicorn_django -b localhost:8003 -p /tmp/gunicorn-bbr-pid settingsstaging.py
directory=/home/user/web/bbr
environment=PYTHONPATH=/home/user/web/bbr
user=www-data
autostart= …

supervisord is a system for starting and stopping processes on Unix boxes.

Installing

To install on Debian (assuming python setuptools are installed):

# easy_install supervisor

Once it has installed, run echo_supervisord_conf at a command prompt to get an example config file. You can then redirect this to /etc/supervisord.conf to get …

I wanted to have Hudson pick a Django project from Mercurial, spin it up using Gunicorn, and then run some selenium tests against it. This is on a Debian server, the same server as the Mercurial repository is located on.

I already had my code coming out of Mercurial to …

Here's how to avoid storing hard coded path names in Django.

manage.py

In manage.py, change the top of the file to setup sys.path like this:

import os,sys
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
PROJECT_DIR = os.path …