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 a default config file.

# echo_supervisord_conf > /etc/supervisord.conf

Configuring

As an example configuration, add the following into /etc/supervisord.conf:

[program:foo]
command=/bin/cat

This is simple configuration that the program cat will be run whenever supervisord starts.

Starting

To start supervisord, just run it at a root prompt:

# supervisord

You can then use the ctl command to list processes:

# supervisorctl
foo                              RUNNING    pid 5490, uptime 0:00:19
supervisor> exit

Web Interface

To enable the web interface, edit /etc/supervisord.conf, uncomment the inet_http_server section and listen on *:9001

[inet_http_server] 
port=*:9001

You can now navigate to host:9001 from any local machine and see a list of processes that are running. You can also stop them, so be sure to secure this if required!

References

• http://supervisord.org/