Unicorn Herder

Unicorn and Gunicorn are awesome tools for people writing web services in Ruby and Python. One of the more nifty features of both programs is their ability to reload application code on-the-fly, by spawning a new master process (or "arbiter", in Gunicorn's language) in response to an operating system signal (SIGUSR2). Unfortunately, this reloading process is incompatible with process-tracking supervisors such as Upstart, because the old master process dies as part of the reload.

Unicorn Herder is a utility designed to assist in the use of Upstart and similar supervisors with Unicorn. It does this by polling the pidfile written by the Unicorn master process, and automating the sequence of signals that must be sent to the master to do a "hot-reload". If Unicorn quits, so will the Unicorn Herder, meaning that if you supervise the herder (which does not daemonize), you are effectively supervising the Unicorn process.

Installation

Unicorn Herder is available from the Python Package Index, and can be installed with pip:

$ pip install unicornherder

Usage

With gunicorn:

$ unicornherder -- -w 4 myapp:app

With unicorn (using Bundler):

$ bundle exec unicornherder -u unicorn

Signals

Unicorn Herder forwards the following signals to the unicorn master process:

INT QUIT TERM TTIN TTOU USR1 USR2

Notably, Unicorn Herder does not forward SIGWINCH, because it is not intended to be daemonized.

Unicorn Herder also intercepts SIGHUP, because this is the signal sent by Upstart when you call initctl reload, and uses it to trigger a hot-reload of its Unicorn instance. This process will take two minutes by default, in order to give the new workers time to start up.

NB: There will be a period during hot-reload when requests are served by both old and new workers. This might have serious implications if you are running data migrations between deploying versions of your application. Please bear this in mind when deciding if you should use Unicorn Herder's hot-reloading feature.

This diagram shows the interactions between unicornherder and (g)unicorn masters at boot and around hot-reloading with HUP (ignoring workers):

Upstart config

An example upstart config (compatible with Upstart v1.4 and later) for use with Unicorn Herder is given below:

description "Unicorn Herder"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn
respawn limit 5 20

env PORT=4567

setuid www
setgid www

chdir /var/apps/myapp

exec bundle exec unicornherder -u unicorn -- --port $PORT

# Or, for a gunicorn installation with a virtualenv
# at /var/venv/myapp...

#script
#  . /var/venv/myapp/bin/activate
#  exec unicornherder -- -w 4 -b "127.0.0.1:$PORT" myapp:app
#end script