Running NColony

In this section, we assume everything to be running in an environment where “pip install ncolony” has taken place. This will usually be a virtualenv, which should be activated.

Running ncolony monitor

Create two directories: conf and messages. For simplicity, we will assume that they live in the root directory, //conf/ and /messages/.

twistd -n ncolony --messages /messages --config /conf

Of course, it is useless to run a monitor without any processes to monitor:

python -m ncolony ctl add my-cat-program --cmd cat

This will add the cat program as a monitored program. Because cat hangs forever reading from stdin, it will never die. It is important to note that it does not matter what order we run these in. In fact, if we now shut down (via CTRL-C) the ncolony monitor, and start it again, it will start the cat program again.

twistd Command-Line Options

A full set of twistd command-line options can be found in the twistd help (available via twistd --help).

twistd ncolony Command-Line Options

Option: –config DIR
Directory for configuration
Option: –messages DIR
Directory for messages
Option: –frequency SECONDS
Frequency of checking for updates [default: 10]
Option: –pid DIR
Directory of PID files
Option: -t SECONDS, –threshold SECONDS
How long a process has to live before the death is considered instant, in seconds. [default: 1]
Option: -k SECONDS, –killtime SECONDS
How long a process being killed has to get its affairs in order before it gets killed with an unmaskable signal. [default: 5]
Option: -m SECONDS, –minrestartdelay SECONDS
The minimum time (in seconds) to wait before attempting to restart a process [default: 1]
Option: -M SECONDS, –maxrestartdelay SECONDS
The maximum time (in seconds) to wait before attempting to restart a process [default: 3600]

python -m ctl Command-Line Options

The following must be given before the subcommand:

Option: –messages DIR
directory of NColony monitor messages
Option: –config DIR
directory of NColony monitor configuration

The following follow the subcommand:

restart-all
Takes no arguments
restart, remove
Only one positional argument – name of program

python -m ctl add Command-Line Options

Option: –cmd CMD
Name of executable
Option: –arg ARGS
Add an argument to the command
Option: –env NAME=VALUE
Add an environment variable
Option: –uid UID
Run as given user id (only useful if ncolony monitor is running as root)
Option: –gid GID
Run as given group id (only useful if ncolony monitor is running as root)
Option: –extras EXTRAS
a JSON-encoded dictionary with extra configuration parameters. Those are not used by the monitor itself, but are available to the running program (as the variable NCOLONY_CONFIG) and to other programs which scan the configuration directory.

For programmatic access, it is recommended to use the ncolony.ctllib module from a Python program instead of passing arguments to a python -m ncolony ctl subprocess.

Logging

The log of ncolony itself is configured by using the twistd log configuration. While ncolony will log processes’ stdout/err, it is highly encouraged to set logs for these. Ideally, ncolony logs should also show either catastrophic errors in processes, such that even the log could not be opened, or messages that are sent before the log is set.