Superintendent Chalmers

Chalmers is an application that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on any operating system (Posix and Win32 included)

Features

• Process control: Chalmers lets you add remove and monitor programs
• System Init: Chalmers easily allows you to start up your programs at system boot or user login with chalmers @startup and chalmers @login
• Keep Alive: Chalmers will relaunch your programs if they fail unexpectedly
• Logging: Chalmers will manage store all logs from stdout/stderr and provides easy access with chalmers log

Quick Start

Adding a Program

This will start the sleep program and keep it running.

chalmers add --name myprogram -- sleep 1000
chalmers start myprogram

Check the program status

chalmers list

Chalmers Program Configuration

To set an option for a program run chalmers set eg.

chalmers set program-name key1=value1 [key2=value2 ...]

See the list below for a list of useful keys

Running chalmers on system startup

This will setup chalmers to start as the current user using the os native init scripts. On windows, you can use runas instead of sudo if you are not administrator.

sudo chalmers @startup enable

You can also select the user you want enable at startup:

sudo chalmers @startup enable --user USER

You will need to start chalmers

Running chalmers on system login

Sometimes you may not have root or admin privileges. You can also set up chalmers to run at login:

chalmers @login enable

Turning on and off scripts to be run at login or startup

When chalmers starts at login or startup it will launch all of the programs marked as on.

To toggle a single program as on or off run

chalmers [on|off] myprogram  

Common Config values:

• startsecs: The time in seconds that the program is assumed to be starting up If the program exits before this time it is considered to be spinning

• startretries: The number or times to launch a spinning program

• stopwaitsecs: Wait this long

• exitcodes: A list of exit codes that are accepted as a successful exit

• stopsignal: The signal to sent to terminate the program. May be an int or string eg: 'SIGTERM' or 15
  This must be only 'SIGTERM' or 'SIGINT' on win32 platforms.

• cwd: Directory start the program

• env.ENVVAR: Replace ENVVAR with the name of the environment variable you want to set. eg.

  chalmers set program-name env.PORT=4567
  

Log file config values:

• redirect_stderr: Direct stderr to the same log file as stdout (default is True)
• stdout: filename to pipe the program's stdout
• stderr: filename to pipe the program's stderr
• log_dir: The base directory to output logs
• daemon_log: filename to pipe the programs control log
• env.PYTHONUNBUFFERED: Set this value to 1 if you want are running a python program and want realtime logging See: https://docs.python.org/2/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONUNBUFFERED

Posix Only Config values:

• umask: Abbreviation of user mask: sets the file mode creation mask of the current process. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umask
• user: User to run the program as. May be a username or UID. This option is only valid when chalmers is run as the root user

Example of setting up a server

chalmers add --run-later -n server -- python my_server.py
chalmers set server env.PORT=3030
chalmers start server

Chalmers command reference

A comparison with other utilities

Supervisord supervisord.org

• Supervisord does not run on windows, Chalmers runs on all platforms.
• Supervisord does not start at system boot. Chalmers does this for all platforms with chalmers service install.
• Managing Supervisord config files can be a pain. Chalmers allows command line control of the addition and removal of programs with chalmers add|start|stop|remove

Forever github.com/nodejitsu/forever

• Forever only supports nodejs applications
• Forever does not start at system boot. Chalmers does this for all platforms with chalmers service install.
• Forever does have windows support, but it can not daemonize windows processes.

Honcho honcho.readthedocs.org

• Currently chalmers does not support Procfile-based applications (coming soon)

Posix sysv-init, upstart, systemd , launchd (osx) and Windows services

• These utilities require admin privileges to run. Chalmers does not
• Chalmers utilizes all of these services by selecting the correct one when chalmers service install is run.
• These utilities require custom wrappers around the scripts that you may need to run. Chalmers allows non-root command line control of the addition and removal of programs with chalmers run|start|stop|remove