ooyala/barkeep — Issue #167: Make our daemons debuggable
Author: cespare
Created: 2012-01-21 22:47:29+00:00
State: open
Labels: dev

When our long-running processes inside Daemon blocks crash, it can be very difficult to debug them. I have had this problem on multiple installations now (Manish's and my own). If there is a problem such that the script in question can be run without the Daemons block surrounding it, but crashes when it is run by Daemons, it is impossible to get at the STDOUT/STDERR of the process. (The `:log_output` option to Daemons, which is supposed to redirect output to a logfile in the pidfile directory, has never worked when I've used it.)

If we run something with Daemons and it immediately crashes it would be nice if we could know that (instead of having to do a bunch of manual inspection to see if things are up). It may be worth investigating to see if there are better alternatives for daemonization.