supervisor

Supervisor: A System for Allowing the Control of Process State on UNIX

History

7/3/2006: updated for version 2.0

8/30/2006: updated for version 2.1

3/31/2007: updated for version 2.2

8/15/2007: updated for version 3.0

Upgrading

If you are upgrading from supervisor version 2.X to version 3.X, and
you wish to preserve your supervisor configuration file, you will
need to read the file named 'UPGRADING.txt' within the same
directory as this file. Some configuration file options have
changed and new ones have been added.

Introduction

The supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to
control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems. It
was inspired by the following:

- It is often inconvenient to need to write "rc.d" scripts for
every single process instance. rc.d scripts are a great
lowest-common-denominator form of process
initialization/autostart/management, but they can be painful to
write and maintain. Additionally, rc.d scripts cannot
automatically restart a crashed process and many programs do not
restart themselves properly on a crash. Supervisord starts
processes as its subprocesses, and can be configured to
automatically restart them on a crash. It can also automatically
be configured to start processes on its own invocation.

- It's often difficult to get accurate up/down status on processes
on UNIX. Pidfiles often lie. Supervisord starts processes as
subprocesses, so it always knows the true up/down status of its
children and can be queried conveniently for this data.

- Users who need to control process state often need only to do
that. They don't want or need full-blown shell access to the
machine on which the processes are running. Supervisorctl allows
a very limited form of access to the machine, essentially
allowing users to see process status and control
supervisord-controlled subprocesses by emitting "stop", "start",
and "restart" commands from a simple shell or web UI.

- Users often need to control processes on many machines.
Supervisor provides a simple, secure, and uniform mechanism for
interactively and automatically controlling processes on groups
of machines.

- Processes which listen on "low" TCP ports often need to be
started and restarted as the root user (a UNIX misfeature). It's
usually the case that it's perfectly fine to allow "normal"
people to stop or restart such a process, but providing them with
shell access is often impractical, and providing them with root
access or sudo access is often impossible. It's also (rightly)
difficult to explain to them why this problem exists. If
supervisord is started as root, it is possible to allow "normal"
users to control such processes without needing to explain the
intricacies of the problem to them.

- Processes often need to be started and stopped in groups,
sometimes even in a "priority order". It's often difficult to
explain to people how to do this. Supervisor allows you to
assign priorities to processes, and allows user to emit commands
via the supervisorctl client like "start all", and "restart all",
which starts them in the preassigned priority order.
Additionally, processes can be grouped into "process groups" and
a set of logically related processes can be stopped and started
as a unit.

Supported Platforms

Supervisor has been tested and is known to run on Linux (Fedora Core
5, Ubuntu 6), Mac OS X (10.4), and Solaris (10 for Intel) and
FreeBSD 6.1. It will likely work fine on most UNIX systems.

Supervisor will not run at all under any version of Windows.

Supervisor requires Python 2.3 or better.

Installing

Run "python setup.py install". This will download and install all
distributions depended upon by supervisor and finally install
supervisor itself. Once that's done, copy the "sample.conf" file
you'll find in the same directory as this file to
/etc/supervisord.conf and modify to your liking. If you'd rather
not put the supervisord.conf file in /etc, you can place it anywhere
and start supervisord and point it at the configuration file via the
-c flag, e.g. "python supervisord.py -c /path/to/sample/conf" or, if
you use the shell script named "supervisord", "supervisord -c
/path/to/sample.conf".

I make reference below to a "$BINDIR" when explaining how to run
supervisord and supervisorctl. This is the "bindir" directory that
your Python installation has been configured with. For example, for
an installation of Python installed via "./configure
--prefix=/usr/local/python; make; make install", $BINDIR would be
"/usr/local/python/bin". Python interpreters on different platforms
use different $BINDIRs. Look at the output of "setup.py install" if
you can't figure out where yours is.

Installing Without Internet Access

Since "setup.py install" performs downloads of dependent software,
it will not work on machines without internet access. To install to
a machine which is not internet connected, obtain the following
dependencies on a machine which is internet-connected:

- setuptools (latest) from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

- meld3 (0.6) from http://www.plope.com/software/meld3/

- medusa (0.5.4) from http://www.amk.ca/python/code/medusa.html

- elementtree (1.2.6) from http://effbot.org/downloads#elementtree

And then copy these files to removable media and put them on the
target machine. Install each onto the target machine as per its
instructions.

*Note* -- if the machine you're installing on does not have a C
compiler, meld3's "setup.py install" probably won't work because
meld3 uses C extensions, but you can either copy the meld3/meld3
directory into your Python's site-packages directory, or you can
build a binary distribution for your platform on a similar machine
that does have a C compiler before shipping it over by doing "python
setup.py bdist".

Finally, run supervisor's "python setup.py install".

Running Supervisord

To start supervisord, run $BINDIR/supervisord. The resulting
process will daemonize itself and detach from the terminal. It
keeps an operations log at "/tmp/supervisor.log" by default.

You can start supervisord in the foreground by passing the "-n" flag
on its command line. This is useful to debug startup problems.

To change the set of programs controlled by supervisord, edit the
supervisord.conf file and kill -HUP or otherwise restart the
supervisord process. This file has several example program
definitions.

Supervisord accepts a number of command-line overrides. Type
'supervisord -h' for an overview.

Running Supervisorctl

To start supervisorctl, run $BINDIR/supervisorctl. A shell will
be presented that will allow you to control the processes that are
currently managed by supervisord. Type "help" at the prompt to get
information about the supported commands.

supervisorctl may be invoked with "one time" commands when invoked
with arguments from a command line. An example: "supervisorctl stop
all". If arguments are present on the supervisorctl command-line,
it will prevent the interactive shell from being invoked. Instead,
the command will be executed and supervisorctl will exit.

If supervisorctl is invoked in interactive mode against a
supervisord that requires authentication, you will be asked for
authentication credentials.

Components

Supervisord

The server piece of the supervisor is named "supervisord". It is
responsible for responding to commands from the client process as
well as restarting crashed or exited processes. It is meant to be
run as the root user in most production setups. NOTE: see
"Security Notes" at the end of this document for caveats!

The server process uses a configuration file. This is typically
located in "/etc/supervisord.conf". This configuration file is an
"Windows-INI" style config file. It is important to keep this
file secure via proper filesystem permissions because it may
contain unencrypted usernames and passwords.

Supervisorctl

The command-line client piece of the supervisor is named
"supervisorctl". It provides a shell-like interface to the
features provided by supervisord. From supervisorctl, a user can
connect to different supervisord processes, get status on the
subprocesses controlled by a supervisord, stop and start
subprocesses of a supervisord, and get lists of running processes
of a supervisord.

The command-line client talks to the server across a UNIX domain
socket or an Internet socket. The server can assert that the user
of a client should present authentication credentials before it
allows him to perform commands. The client process may use the
same configuration file as the server; any configuration file with
a [supervisorctl] section in it will work.

Web Server

A (sparse) web user interface with functionality comparable to
supervisorctl may be accessed via a browser if you start
supervisord against an internet socket. Visit the server URL
(e.g. http://localhost:9001/) to view and control process status
through the web interface after changing the configuration file's
'http_port' parameter appropriately.

XML-RPC Interface

The same HTTP server which serves the web UI serves up an XML-RPC
interface that can be used to interrogate and control supervisor
and the programs it runs. To use the XML-RPC interface, connect
to supervisor's http port with any XML-RPC client library and run
commands against it. An example of doing this using Python's
xmlrpclib client library::

import xmlrpclib
server = xmlrpclib.Server('http://localhost:9001')

Call methods against the supervisor and its subprocesses by using
the 'supervisor' namespace::

server.supervisor.getState()

You can get a list of methods supported by supervisor's XML-RPC
interface by using the XML-RPC 'system.listMethods' API::

server.system.listMethods()

You can see help on a method by using the 'system.methodHelp' API
against the method::

print server.system.methodHelp('supervisor.shutdown')

Supervisor's XML-RPC interface also supports the nascent XML-RPC
multicall API described at
http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$1208.

You can extend supervisor functionality with new XML-RPC API
methods by adding new top-level RPC interfaces as necessary. See
"Configuration File ['rpcinterface:x] Section Settings" in this
file.

Configuration File '[supervisord]' Section Settings

The supervisord.conf log file contains a section named
'[supervisord]' in which global settings for the supervisord process
should be inserted. These are:

'http_port' -- Either a TCP host:port value or (e.g. 127.0.0.1:9001)
or a path to a UNIX domain socket (e.g. /tmp/supervisord.sock) on
which supervisor will listen for HTTP/XML-RPC requests.
Supervisorctl itself uses XML-RPC to communicate with supervisord
over this port.

'sockchmod' -- Change the UNIX permission mode bits of the http_port
UNIX domain socket to this value (ignored if using a TCP socket).
Default: 0700.

'sockchown' -- Change the user and group of the socket file to this
value. May be a username (e.g. chrism) or a username and group
separated by a dot (e.g. chrism.wheel) Default: do not change.

'umask' -- The umask of the supervisord process. Default: 022.

'logfile' -- The path to the activity log of the supervisord process.

'logfile_maxbytes' -- The maximum number of bytes that may be
consumed by the activity log file before it is rotated (suffix
multipliers like "KB", "MB", and "GB" can be used in the value).
Set this value to 0 to indicate an unlimited log size. Default:
50MB.

'logfile_backups' -- The number of backups to keep around resulting
from activity log file rotation. Set this to 0 to indicate an
unlimited number of backups. Default: 10.

'loglevel' -- The logging level, dictating what is written to the
activity log. One of 'critical', 'error', 'warn', 'info', 'debug'
or 'trace'. Note that at log level 'trace', the supervisord log
file will record the stderr/stdout output of its child processes,
which is useful for debugging. Default: info.

'pidfile' -- The location in which supervisord keeps its pid file.

'nodaemon' -- If true, supervisord will start in the foreground
instead of daemonizing. Default: false.

'minfds' -- The minimum number of file descriptors that must be
available before supervisord will start successfully. Default:
1024.

'minprocs' -- The minimum nymber of process descriptors that must be
available before supervisord will start successfully. Default: 200.

'nocleanup' -- prevent supervisord from clearing any existing "AUTO"
log files at startup time. Default: false.

'http_username' -- the username required for authentication to our
HTTP server. Default: none.

'http_password' -- the password required for authentication to our
HTTP server. Default: none.

'childlogdir' -- the directory used for AUTO log files. Default:
value of Python's tempfile.get_tempdir().

'user' -- if supervisord is run as root, switch users to this UNIX
user account before doing any meaningful processing. This value has
no effect if supervisord is not run as root. Default: do not switch
users.

'directory' -- When supervisord daemonizes, switch to this
directory. Default: do not cd.

'strip_ansi' -- Strip all ANSI escape sequences from process log
files.

'environment' -- A list of key/value pairs in the form
"KEY=val,KEY2=val2" that will be placed in the supervisord process'
environment (and as a result in all of its child process'
environments). Default: none. **Note** that subprocesses will
inherit the environment variables of the shell used to start
"supervisord" except for the ones overridden here and within the
program's "environment" configuration stanza. See "Subprocess
Environment" below.

'identifier' -- The identifier for this supervisor server, used by
the RPC interface. Default: 'supervisor'.

Configuration File '[supervisorctl]' Section Settings

The configuration file may contain settings for the supervisorctl
interactive shell program. These options are listed below.

'serverurl' -- The URL that should be used to access the supervisord
server, e.g. "http://localhost:9001". For UNIX domain sockets, use
"unix:///absolute/path/to/file.sock".

'username' -- The username to pass to the supervisord server for use
in authentication (should be same as 'http_username' in supervisord
config). Optional.

'password' -- The password to pass to the supervisord server for use
in authentication (should be the same as 'http_password' in
supervisord config). Optional.

'prompt' -- String used as supervisorctl prompt. Default: supervisor.

Configuration File '[program:x]' Section Settings

The .INI file must contain one or more 'program' sections in order
for supervisord to know which programs it should start and control.
A sample program section has the following structure, the options of
which are described below it::

[program:foo]
command=/path/to/foo
process_name = %(program_name)s
numprocs=1
priority=1
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=1
startretries=3
exitcodes=0,2
stopsignal=TERM
stopwaitsecs=10
user=nobody
redirect_stderr=false
stdout_logfile=AUTO
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=50MB
stdout_logfile_backups=10
stdout_capturefile=NONE
stderr_logfile=AUTO
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=50MB
stderr_logfile_backups=10
stderr_capturefile=NONE
environment=A=1,B=2

'[program:foo]' -- the section header, required for each program.
'programname' is a descriptive name (arbitrary) used to describe the
program being run. It must not include a colon character or a
bracket character.

'command' -- the command that will be run when this program is
started. The command can be either absolute,
e.g. ('/path/to/programname') or relative ('programname'). If it is
relative, the PATH will be searched for the executable. Programs
can accept arguments, e.g. ('/path/to/program foo bar'). The
command line can used double quotes to group arguments with spaces
in them to pass to the program, e.g. ('/path/to/program/name -p "foo
bar"'). Note that the value of 'command' may include Python string
expressions, e.g. "/path/to/programname --port=80%(process_num)02d"
might expand to "/path/to/programname --port=8000" at runtime.
String expressions are evaluated against a dictionary containing the
keys "group_name", "process_num" and "program_name". **Controlled
programs should themselves not be daemons, as supervisord assumes it
is responsible for daemonizing its subprocesses (see "Nondaemonizing
of Subprocesses" later in this document).**

'process_name' -- a Python string expression that is used to compose
the supervisor process name for this process. You usually don't
need to worry about setting this unless you change 'numprocs'. The
string expression is evaluated against a dictionary that includes
"group_name", "process_num" and "program_name". Default:
%(program_name)s. (New in 3.0)

'numprocs' -- Supervisor will start as many instances of this
program as named by numprocs. Note that if numprocs > 1, the
'process_name' expression must include '%(process_num)s' (or any
other valid Python string expression that includes 'process_num')
within it. Default: 1. (New in 3.0)

'priority' -- the relative priority of the program in the start and
shutdown ordering. Lower priorities indicate programs that start
first and shut down last at startup and when aggregate commands are
used in various clients (e.g. "start all"/"stop all"). Higher
priorities indicate programs that start last and shut down first.
Default: 999.

'autostart' -- If true, this program will start automatically when
supervisord is started. Default: true.

'autorestart' -- If true, when the program exits (either expectedly
or unexpectedly), supervisor will restart it automatically.
Default: true.

'startsecs' -- The total number of seconds which the program needs
to stay running after a startup to consider the start successful.
If the program does not stay up for this many seconds after it is
started, even if it exits with an "expected" exit code (see
"exitcodes"), the startup will be considered a failure. Set to 0
to indicate that the program needn't stay running for any particular
amount of time. Default: 1

'startretries' -- The number of serial failure attempts that
supervisord will allow when attempting to start the program before
giving up and puting the process into an ERROR state. Default: 3.

'exitcodes' -- The list of 'expected' exit codes for this program.
Supervisor log messages will note if the program exits with an exit
code which is not in this list and a stop of the program has not
been explicitly requested. Default: 0,2.

'stopsignal' -- The signal used to kill the program when a stop is
requested. This can be any of TERM, HUP, INT, QUIT, KILL, USR1, or
USR2. Default: TERM.

'stopwaitsecs' -- The number of seconds to wait for the program to
return a SIGCHILD to supervisord after the program has been sent a
stopsignal. If this number of seconds elapses before supervisord
receives a SIGCHILD from the process, supervisord will attempt to
kill it with a final SIGKILL. Default: 10.

'user' -- If supervisord is running as root, this UNIX user account
will be used as the account which runs the program. If supervisord
is not running as root, this option has no effect. Default: do not
switch users.

'redirect_stderr' -- If true, cause the process' stderr output to be
sent back to supervisor on it's stdout file descriptor (in UNIX
shell terms, this is the equivalent of executing "/the/program
2>&1". Default: false. (New in 3.0, replaces 2.0's "log_stdout" and
"log_stderr")

'stdout_logfile' -- Put process stdout output in this file (and if
redirect_stderr is true, also place stderr output in this file). If
'stdout_logfile' is unset or set to 'AUTO', supervisor will
automatically choose a file location. If this is set to 'NONE',
supervisord will create no log file. AUTO log files and their
backups will be deleted when supervisord restarts. The
stdout_logfile value can contain Python string expressions that will
evaluated against a dictionary that contains the keys "process_num",
"program_name" and "group_name". Default: AUTO. (New in 3.0,
replaces 2.0's "logfile")

'stdout_logfile_maxbytes' -- The maximum number of bytes that may be
consumed by stdout_logfile before it is rotated (suffix multipliers
like "KB", "MB", and "GB" can be used in the value). Set this value
to 0 to indicate an unlimited log size. Default: 50MB. (New in
3.0, replaces 2.0's "logfile_maxbytes")

'stdout_logfile_backups' -- The number of stdout_logfile backups to
keep around resulting from process stdout log file rotation. Set
this to 0 to indicate an unlimited number of backups. Default: 10.
(New in 3.0, replaces "logfile_backups")

'stdout_capturefile' -- file written to when process is in "stdout
capture mode" (see "Capture Mode and Process Communication Events"
later in this document). May be a file path, NONE, or AUTO. The
stdout_capturefile value can contain Python string expressions that
will evaluated against a dictionary that contains the keys
"process_num", "program_name" and "group_name". Default: NONE.
(New in 3.0)

'stderr_logfile' -- Put process stderr output in this file unless
redirect_stderr is true. Accepts the same value types as
"stdout_logfile" and may contain the same Python string expressions.
Default: AUTO. (New in 3.0)

'stderr_logfile_maxbytes' -- The maximum number of bytes before
logfile rotation for stderr_logfile. Accepts the same value types
as "stdout_logfile_maxbytes". Default: 50MB. (New in 3.0)

'stderr_logfile_backups' -- The number of backups to keep around
resulting from process stderr log file rotation. Default: 10. (New
in 3.0)

'stderr_capturefile' -- file written to when process is in "stderr
capture mode" (see "Capture Mode and Process Communication Events"
later in this document). May contain the same Python string
expressions as "stdout_capturefile". May be a file path, NONE, or
AUTO. Default: NONE. (New in 3.0)

'environment' -- A list of key/value pairs in the form
"KEY=val,KEY2=val2" that will be placed in the child process'
environment. The environment string may contain Python string
expressions that will be evaluated against a dictionary containing
"process_num", "program_name" and "group_name". Default: none.
**Note** that the subprocess will inherit the environment variables
of the shell used to start "supervisord" except for the ones
overridden here. See "Subprocess Environment" below.

Note that a '[program:x]' section actually represents a "homogeneous
process group" to supervisor (new in 3.0). The members of the group
are defined by the combination of the 'numprocs and 'process_name'
parameters in the configuration. By default, if numprocs and
process_name are left unchanged from their defaults, the group
represented by '[program:x]' will be named 'x' and will have a
single process named 'x' in it. This provides a modicum of
backwards compatibility with older supervisor releases, which did
not treat program sections as homogeneous process group defnitions.

But for instance, if you have a '[program:foo]' section with a
'numprocs' of 3 and a 'process_name' expression of
'%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d', the "foo" group will contain
three processes, named 'foo_00', 'foo_01', and 'foo_02'. This makes
it possible to start a number of very similar processes using a
single '[program:x]' section. All logfile names, all environment
strings, and the command of programs can also contain similar Python
string expressions, to pass slightly different parameters to each
process.

Configuration File '[group:x]' Section Settings (New in 3.0)

It is often useful to group "homogeneous" processes groups (aka
"programs") together into a "heterogeneous" process group so they
can be controlled as a unit from supervisor's various controller
interfaces.

To place programs into a group so you can treat them as a unit,
define a '[group:x]' section in your configuration file, e.g.::

[group:foo]
programs=bar,baz
priority=999

For the example above to work, there must be two 'program' sections
elsewhere in your configuration file: '[program:bar]' and
'[program:baz]'. If "homogeneous" program groups" (represented by
program sections) are placed into a "heterogeneous" group via
'[group:x]' section's "programs=" line, the homogeneous groups that
are implied by the program section will not exist at runtime in
supervisor. Instead, all processes belonging to each of the
homogeneous groups will be placed into the heterogeneous group. In
the above example, it means that the 'bar' and 'baz' homogeneous
groups will not exist, and the processes that would have been under
them will now be moved into the 'foo' group.

Configuration File '[eventlistener:x]' Section Settings (New in 3.0)

Supervisor allows specialized homogeneous process groups ("event
listener pools") to be defined within the configuration file. These
pools contain processes that are meant to receive and respond to
event notifications from supervisor's event system. See "Supervisor
Events" elsewhere in this document for an explanation of how events
work and how to implement event listener programs.

An example of an eventlistener section defined within a supervisor
configuration file, which creates a pool::

[eventlistener:theeventlistenername]
command=/bin/eventlistener
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
numprocs=5
events=PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE
buffer_size=10
priority=-1
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=1
startretries=3
exitcodes=0,2
stopsignal=QUIT
stopwaitsecs=10
user=chrism
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/a/path
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=1MB
stdout_logfile_backups=10
stderr_logfile=/a/path
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=1MB
stderr_logfile_backups
environment=A=1,B=2

Note that all the options available to '[program:x]' sections are
respected by eventlistener sections except for "stdout_capturefile"
and "stderr_capturefile" (event listeners cannot emit process
communication events, see "Capture Mode and Process Communication
Events" elsewhere in this document).

'[eventlistener:x]' sections have two keys which '[program:x]'
sections do not have:

'buffer_size' -- The event listener pool's event queue buffer size.
When a listener pool's event buffer is overflowed (as can happen
when an event listener pool cannot keep up with all of the events
sent to it), the oldest event in the buffer is discarded.

'events' -- A comma-separated list of event type names that this
listener is "interested" in receiving notifications for (see
"Supervisor Events" elsewhere in this document for a list of valid
event type names).

Configuration File '[rpcinterface:x]' Section Settings (ADVANCED, New in 3.0)

Changing "rpcinterface:x" settings in the configuration file is only
useful for people who wish to extend supervisor with additional
behavior.

In the sample config file, there is a section which is named
"rpcinterface:supervisor". By default it looks like this::

[rpcinterface:supervisor]
supervisor.rpcinterface_factory = supervisor.xmlrpc:make_main_rpcinterface

This section *must* remain in the configuration for the standard
setup of supervisor to work properly. If you don't want supervisor
to do anything it doesn't already do out of the box, this is all you
need to know about this type of section.

However, if you wish to add rpc interface namespaces to a custom
version of supervisor, you may add additional [rpcinterface:foo]
sections, where "foo" represents the namespace of the interface
(from the web root), and the value named by
"supervisor.rpcinterface_factory" is a factory callable which should
have a function signature that accepts a single positional argument
"supervisord" and as many keyword arguments as required to perform
configuration. Any key/value pairs defined within the
rpcinterface:foo section will be passed as keyword arguments to the
factory. Here's an example of a factory function, created in the
package "my.package"::

def make_another_rpcinterface(supervisord, **config):
retries = int(config.get('retries', 0))
another_rpc_interface = AnotherRPCInterface(supervisord, retries)
return another_rpc_interface

And a section in the config file meant to configure
it::

[rpcinterface:another]
supervisor.rpcinterface_factory = my.package:make_another_rpcinterface
retries = 1

Nondaemonizing of Subprocesses

Programs run under supervisor *should not* daemonize themselves.
Instead, they should run in the foreground and not detach from the
"terminal" that starts them. The easiest way to tell if a command
will run in the foreground is to run the command from a shell
prompt. If it gives you control of the terminal back, it's
daemonizing itself and that will be the wrong way to run it under
supervisor. You want to run a command that essentially requires you
to press Ctrl-C to get control of the terminal back. If it gives
you a shell prompt back after running it without needing to press
Ctrl-C, it's not useful under supervisor. All programs have options
to be run in the foreground but there's no standard way to do it;
you'll need to read the documentation for each program you want to
do this with.

Subprocess Environment

Subprocesses will inherit the environment of the shell used to start
the supervisord program. Several environment variables will be set
by supervisor itself in the child's environment also, including
"SUPERVISOR_ENABLED" (a flag indicating the process is under
supervisor control), "SUPERVISOR_PROCESS_NAME" (the
config-file-specified process name for this process) and
"SUPERVISOR_GROUP_NAME" (the config-file-specified process group name
for the child process).

These environment variables may be overridden within the
"environment" global config option (applies to all subprocesses) or
within the per-program "environment" config option (applies only to
the subprocess specified within the "program" section). These
"environment" settings are additive. In other words, each
subprocess' environment will consist of::

The environment variables set within the shell used to start
supervisord...

... added-to/overridden-by ...

... the environment variables set within the "environment" global
config option ...

... added-to/overridden-by ...

... supervisor-specific environment variables
("SUPERVISOR_ENABLED", "SUPERVISOR_PROCESS_NAME",
"SUPERVISOR_GROUP_NAME") .. (New in 3.0)

... added-to/overridden-by ...

.. the environment variables set within the per-process
"environment" config option.

No shell is executed by supervisord when it runs a subprocess, so
settings such as USER, PATH, HOME, SHELL, LOGNAME, etc. are not
changed from their defaults or otherwise reassigned. This is
particularly important to note when you are running a program from a
supervisord run as root with a "user=" stanza in the configuration.
Unlike cron, supervisord does not attempt to divine and override
"fundamental" environment variables like USER, PATH, HOME, and
LOGNAME when it performs a setuid to the user defined within the
"user=" program config option. If you need to set environment
variables for a particular program that might otherwise be set by a
shell invocation for a particular user, you must do it explicitly
within the "environment=" program config option. For example::

[program:apache]
command=/home/chrism/bin/httpd -DNO_DETACH
user=chrism
environment=HOME=/home/chrism,USER=chrism

Examples of Program Configurations

Apache 2.0.54::

[program:apache]
command=/usr/sbin/httpd -DNO_DETACH

Postgres 8.14::

[program:postgres]
command=/path/to/postmaster
; we use the "fast" shutdown signal SIGINT
stopsignal=INT
redirect_stderr=true

Zope 2.8 instances and ZEO::

[program:zeo]
command=/path/to/runzeo
priority=1

[program:zope1]
command=/path/to/instance/home/bin/runzope
priority=2
redirect_stderr=true

[program:zope2]
command=/path/to/another/instance/home/bin/runzope
priority=2
redirect_stderr=true

OpenLDAP slapd::

[program:slapd]
command=/path/to/slapd -f /path/to/slapd.conf -h ldap://0.0.0.0:8888

Process States

A process controlled by supervisord will be in one of the below
states at any given time. You may see these state names in various
user interface elements.

STOPPED (0) -- The process has been stopped due to a stop request or
has never been started.

STARTING (10) -- The process is starting due to a start request.

RUNNING (20) -- The process is running.

BACKOFF (30) -- The process entered the STARTING state but
subsequently exited too quickly to move to the
RUNNING state.

STOPPING (40) -- The process is stopping due to a stop request.

EXITED (100) -- The process exited from the RUNNING state (expectedly
or unexpectedly).

FATAL (200) -- The process could not be started successfully.

UNKNOWN (1000) -- The process is in an unknown state (programming error).

Process progress through these states as per the following directed
graph::

--> STOPPED
/ |
| |
| |
STOPPING |
^ ^ V
| \--- STARTING <-----> BACKOFF
| / ^ |
| V | |
\-- RUNNING / \ |
| / \ V
V / \ ----- FATAL
EXITED

A process is in the STOPPED state if it has been stopped
adminstratively or if it has never been started.

When an autorestarting process is in the BACKOFF state, it will be
automatically restarted by supervisord. It will switch between
STARTING and BACKOFF states until it becomes evident that it cannot
be started because the number of startretries has exceeded the
maximum, at which point it will transition to the FATAL state. Each
start retry will take progressively more time.

An autorestarted process will never be automtatically restarted if
it ends up in the FATAL state (it must be manually restarted from
this state).

A process transitions into the STOPPING state via an administrative
stop request, and will then end up in the STOPPED state.

A process that cannot be stopped successfully will stay in the
STOPPING state forever. This situation should never be reached
during normal operations as it implies that the process did not
respond to a final SIGKILL, which is "impossible" under UNIX.

State transitions which always require user action to invoke are
these:

FATAL -> STARTING

RUNNING -> STOPPING

State transitions which typically, but not always, require user
action to invoke are these, with exceptions noted:

STOPPED -> STARTING (except at supervisord startup if process is
configured to autostart)

EXITED -> STARTING (except if process is configured to autorestart)

All other state transitions are managed by supervisord
automatically.

Supervisor Events (New in 3.0)

At certain predefined points during supervisord's operation, "event
notifications" are emitted. An event notification implies that
something potentially interesting happened. Event listeners (see
the "Event Listeners" section below) can be configured to subscribe
to event notifications selectively, and may perform arbitrary
actions based on an event notification (send email, make an HTTP
request, etc).

Event types that may be subscribed to by event listeners are
predefined by supervisor and fall into several major categories,
including "process state change", "process communication",
"supervisor state change", and "event system meta" events. These
are described in detail below.

EVENT -- The base event type. This event type is abstract. It will
never be sent directly. Subscribing to this event type will cause a
subscriber to receive all event notifications emitted by supervisor.

Subtypes of EVENT:

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE -- The value of this event type will be the
process name. This event type is abstract, it will never be sent
directly. Subscribing to this event type will cause a subscriber
to receive event notifications of all the types listed below in
"Subtypes of PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE".

The serialized body of a PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE event (and all
subtypes) is in the form::

process_name:
group_name:

Subtypes of PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE:

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING -- indicates a process has moved
from a state to the STARTING state. Subscribing to this event
type will cause a subscriber to receive event notifications of
all the types listed below in "Subtypes of
PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING".

Subtypes of PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING:

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING_FROM_STOPPED -- subtype of
PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING, indicates a process has moved
from the STOPPED state from the STARTING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING_FROM_BACKOFF -- subtype of
PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING, indicates a process has moved
from BACKOFF state to the STARTING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING_FROM_EXITED -- subtype of
PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING, indicates a process has moved
from the EXITED state to the STARTING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING_FROM_FATAL -- subtype of
PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STARTING, indicates a process has moved
to the FATAL state to the STARTING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_RUNNING_FROM_STARTING -- inidicates a
process has moved from the STARTING state to the RUNNING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_BACKOFF_FROM_STARTING -- indicates a
process has moved from the STARTING state to the BACKOFF state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STOPPING_FROM_RUNNING -- indicates a
process has moved from the RUNNING state to the STOPPING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STOPPING_FROM_STARTING -- indicates a
process has moved from the RUNNING state to the STARTING state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_EXITED_OR_STOPPED -- indicates a process
has undergone a state change which caused it to move to the
EXITED or STOPPED state.

Subtypes of PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_EXITED_OR_STOPPED:

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_EXITED_FROM_RUNNNING -- indicates a
process has moved from the RUNNING state to the EXITED state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_STOPPED_FROM_STOPPING -- indicates a
process has moved from the STOPPING state to the STOPPED
state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_FATAL_FROM_BACKOFF -- indicates a process
has moved from the BACKOFF state to the FATAL state.

PROCESS_STATE_CHANGE_TO_UNKNOWN -- indicates a process has moved
from a state to the UNKNOWN state (indicates an error in
supervisord).

PROCESS_COMMUNICATION -- an event type raised when any process
attempts to send information between and
tags in its output. This event type is
abstract, it will never be sent directly. Subscribing to this
event type will cause a subscriber to receive event notifications
of all the types listed below in "Subtypes of
PROCESS_COMMUNICATION".

The serialized body of a PROCESS_COMMUNICATION event (and all
subtypes) is::

process_name:
group_name:


Subtypes of PROCESS_COMMUNICATION:

PROCESS_COMMUNICATION_STDOUT -- indicates a process has sent a
message to supervisor on its stdout file descriptor.

PROCESS_COMMUNICATION_STDERR -- indicates a process has sent a
message to supervisor on its stderr file descriptor.

SUPERVISOR_STATE_CHANGE -- an event type raised when supervisor's
state changes. There is no value. Subscribing to this event type
will cause a subscriber to receive event notifications of all the
types listed below in "Subtypes of SUPERVISOR_STATE_CHANGE".

The serialization of a SUPERVISOR_STATE_CHANGE event is the empty
string.

Subtypes of SUPERVISOR_STATE_CHANGE:

SUPERVISOR_STATE_CHANGE_RUNNING -- indicates that supervisor has
started.

SUPERVISOR_STATE_CHANGE_STOPPING -- indicates that supervisor is
stopping or restarting.

EVENT_BUFFER_OVERFLOW -- an event type raised when a listener
pool's event buffer is overflowed (as can happen when an event
listener pool cannot keep up with all of the events sent to it).
When the pool's event buffer is overflowed, the oldest event in
the buffer is thrown out.

The serialization of an EVENT_BUFFER_OVERFLOW body
is::

group_name:
event_type:

Event Listeners (New in 3.0)

Supervisor event listeners are subprocesses which are treated almost
exactly like supervisor "programs" with the following differences:

- They are defined using an [eventlistener:x] section in the config
file instead of a [program:x] section in the configuration file.

- Supervisor sends specially-formatted input to an event listener's
stdin and expects specially-formatted output from an event
listener's stdout in a request-response cycle. A protocol agreed
upon between supervisor and the listener's implementer allows
listeners to process event notifications.

- Supervisor does not respect "capture mode" output from event
listener processes (see "Capture Mode and Process Communication
Events" elsewhere in this document).

When an [eventlistener:x] section is defined, it actually defines a
"pool", where the number of event listeners in the pool is
determined by the "numprocs" value within the section. Every
process in the event listener pool is treated equally by supervisor,
and supervisor will choose one process from the pool to receive
event notifications (filtered by the "events=" key in the
eventlistener section).

An event listener can send arbitrary output to its stderr, which
will be logged or ignored by supervisord depending on the
stderr-related configuration files in its [eventlistener:x] section.

When an event notification is sent by the supervisor, all event
listener pools which are subscribed to receive events for the
event's type will be found. One of the listeners in each listener
pool will receive the event notification (any "available" listener).

If the event cannot be sent because all listener in a pool are
"busy", the event will be buffered and notification will be retried
later. "Later" is defined as "the next time that supervisord's
select loop executes".

A listener pool has an event buffer queue. The queue is sized via
the listener pool's "buffer_size" config file option. If the queue
is full and supervisor attempts to buffer an event, supervisor will
throw away the oldest event in the buffer, log an error, and send an
EVENT_BUFFER_OVERFLOW event. EVENT_BUFFER_OVERFLOW events are never
themselves buffered.

Event listeners can be implemented in any language. Event listeners
can be long-running or may exit after a single request (depending on
the implementation and the "autorestart" parameter in the
eventlistener's configuration).

An event listener implementation should operate in "unbuffered" mode
or should flush its stdout every time it needs to communicate back
to the supervisord process.

Event Listener States

An event listener process has three possible states that are
maintained by supervisord:

ACKNOWLEDGED -- The event listener has acknowledged (accepted or
rejected) an event send.

READY -- Event notifications may be sent to this event listener.

BUSY -- Event notifications may not be sent to this event
listener.

When an event listener process first starts, supervisor
automatically places it into the ACKNOWLEDGED state to allow for
startup activities or guard against startup failures (hangs). Until
the listener sends a READY token to its stdout, it will stay in this
state.

When supervisord sends an event notification to a listener in the
READY state, the listener will be placed into the BUSY state until
it receives an OK or FAILED response from the listener, at which
time, the listener will be transitioned back into the ACKNOWLEDGED
state.

Event Listener Notification Protocol

Supervisord will notify an event listener in the READY state of an
event by sending data to the stdin of the process. Supervisord will
never send anything to the stdin of an event listener process while
that process is in the BUSY or ACKNOWLEDGED state.

When supervisord sends a notification to an event listener process,
the listener will first be sent a single "header" line on its
stdin. The composition of the line is a set of four tokens separated
by single spaces. The line is terminated with a '\n' (linefeed)
character. The tokens on the line are:



The PROTOCOL_VERSION always consists of "SUPERVISORD" followed
immediately by numeric characters indicating the protocol version,
with no whitespace in between. An example: "SUPERVISOR3.0"

The EVENT_TYPE_NAME is the specific event type name (see "Supervisor
Events" elsewhere in this document). An example:
"PROCESS_COMMUNICATION_STDOUT".

The EVENT_SERIAL_NUM is an integer assigned to each event. It is
useful for functional testing. An example: "30".

The PAYLOAD_LENGTH is an integer indicating the number of bytes in
the event payload. An example: "22".

An example of a complete header line:

SUPERVISOR3.0 PROCESS_COMMUNICATION_STDOUT 30 22\n

Directly following the linefeed character in the header is the event
payload. It consists of PAYLOAD_LENGTH bytes representing a
serialization of the event data. See "Supervisor Events" for the
specific event data serialization definitions. An example payload
for a PROCESS_COMMUNICATION_STDOUT event notification is::

process_name: foo
group_name: bar
This is the data that was sent between the tags

Once it has processed the header, the event listener implementation
should read PAYLOAD_LENGTH bytes from its stdin, perform an
arbitrary action based on the values in the header and the data
parsed out of the serialization. It is free to block for an
arbitrary amount of time while doing this. Supervisor will continue
processing normally as it waits for a response and it will send
other events of the same type to other listener processes in the
same pool as necessary.

After the event listener has processed the event serialization, in
order to notify supervisord about the result, it should send either
an "OK" token or a "FAILED" token immediately followed by a carriage
return character to its stdout. If supervisord receives an "OK"
token, it will assume that the listener processed the event
notification successfully. If it receives a "FAILED" token, it will
assume that the listener has failed to process the event, and the
event will be rebuffered and sent again at a later time. The event
listener may reject the event for any reason by returning a "FAILED"
token. This does not indicate a problem with the event data or the
event listener. Once an "OK" or "FAILED" token is received by
supervisord, the event listener is placed into the ACKNOWLEDGED
state.

Once the listener is in the ACKNOWLEDGED state, it may either exit
(and subsequently be restarted by supervisor if its "autorestart"
config parameter is true), or it may continue running. If it
continues to run, in order to be placed back into the READY state by
supervisord, it must send a "READY" token followed immediately by a
carriage return to its stdout.

Example Event Listener Implementation

A Python implementation of a "long-running" event listener which
accepts an event notification, prints the header and a list of event
serial numbers it has received to its stderr, and responds with an
OK, and then subsequently a READY is as follows::

import sys

L = []

def stdout_write(s):
sys.stdout.write(s)
sys.stdout.flush()

def stderr_write(s):
sys.stderr.write(s)
sys.stderr.flush()

while 1:
stdout_write('READY\n')
line = sys.stdin.readline()
stderr_write(line)
ver, event, serial, length = line.split(' ', 3)
L.append(serial)
data = sys.stdin.read(int(length))
stderr_write(str(L))
stdout_write('OK\n')

Event Listener Error Conditions

If the event listener process dies while the event is being
transmitted to its stdin, or if it dies before sending an OK/FAILED
response back to supervisord, the event is assumed to not be
processed and will be rebuffered by supervisord and sent again
later.

If an event listener sends data to its stdout which supervisor does
not recognize as an appropriate response based on the state that the
event listener is in, the event listener will be placed into the
UNKNOWN state, and no further event notifications will be sent to
it. If an event was being processed by the listener during this
time, it will be rebuffered and sent again later.

Capture Mode and Process Communication Events (New in 3.0)

If a '[program:x]' section in the configuration file defines a
"stdout_capturefile" or "stderr_capturefile" parameter, each process
represented by the program section may emit special tokens on its
stdout or stderr stream (respectively) which will effectively cause
supervisor to emit a "PROCESS_COMMUNICATION" event type.

The process communications protocol relies on two tags, one which
commands supervisor to enter "capture mode" for the stream and one
which commands it to exit. When a process stream enters "capture
mode", data sent to the stream will be sent to a separate logfile
(the "capturefile"). When a process stream exits capture mode, the
data in the capturefile is read into memory (a maximum of 2MB), and
a PROCESS_COMMUNICATION event is emitted by supervisor, which may be
intercepted by event listeners.

The tag to begin "capture mode" in a process stream is
''. The tag to exit capture mode is
''. The data between these tags may be
arbitrary, and forms the payload of the PROCESS_COMMUNICATION event.
For example, if a program is set up with a stdout_capturefile, and
it emits the following on its stdout stream::

Hello!

.. supervisor will emit a PROCESS_COMMUNICATIONS_STDOUT event with
data in the payload of "Hello!".

Signals

Killing supervisord with SIGHUP will stop all processes, reload the
configuration from the config file, and restart all processes.

Killing supervisord with SIGUSR2 will close and reopen the
supervisord activity log and child log files.

Access Control

The UNIX permissions on the socket effectively control who may send
commands to the server. HTTP basic authentication provides access
control for internet and UNIX domain sockets as necessary.

Security Notes

I have done my best to assure that use of a supervisord process
running as root cannot lead to unintended privilege escalation, but
caveat emptor. Particularly, it is not as paranoid as something
like DJ Bernstein's "daemontools", inasmuch as "supervisord" allows
for arbitrary path specifications in its configuration file to which
data may be written. Allowing arbitrary path selections can create
vulnerabilities from symlink attacks. Be careful when specifying
paths in your configuration. Ensure that supervisord's
configuration file cannot be read from or written to by unprivileged
users and that all files installed by the supervisor package have
"sane" file permission protection settings. Additionally, ensure
that your PYTHONPATH is sane and that all Python standard library
files have adequate file permission protections. Then, pray to the
deity of your choice.

Other Notes

Some examples of shell scripts to start services under supervisor
can be found "here":http://www.thedjbway.org/services.html. These
examples are actually for daemontools but the premise is the same
for supervisor. Another collection of recipes for starting various
programs in the foreground is
"here":http://smarden.org/runit/runscripts.html .

Some processes (like mysqld) ignore signals sent to the actual
process/thread which is created by supervisord. Instead, a
"special" thread/process is created by these kinds of programs which
is responsible for handling signals. This is problematic, because
supervisord can only kill a pid which it creates itself, not any
child thread or process of the program it creates. Fortunately,
these programs typically write a pidfile which is meant to be read
in order to kill the process. As a workaround for this case, a
special "pidproxy" program can handle startup of these kinds of
processes. The pidproxy program is a small shim that starts a
process, and upon the receipt of a signal, sends the signal to the
pid provided in a pidfile. A sample supervisord configuration
program entry for a pidproxy-enabled program is provided here::

[program:mysql]
command=/path/to/pidproxy /path/to/pidfile /path/to/mysqld_safe

The pidproxy program is named 'pidproxy.py' and is in the
supervisor distribution.

FAQ

My program never starts and supervisor doesn't indicate any error:
Make sure the "x" bit is set on the executable file you're using in
the command= line.

How can I tell if my program is running under supervisor? Supervisor
and its subprocesses share an environment variable
"SUPERVISOR_ENABLED". When a process is run under supervisor, your
program can check for the presence of this variable to determine
whether it is running under supervisor (new in 2.0).

My command line works fine when I invoke it by hand from a shell
prompt, but when I use the same command line in a supervisor
"command=" section, the program fails mysteriously. Why? This may
be due to your process' dependence on environment variable settings.
See "Subprocess Environment" in this document.

Maillist and Reporting Bugs

You may subscribe to the 'Supervisor-users'
"maillist":http://lists.palladion.com/mailman/listinfo/supervisor-users

Please report bugs at "the
collector":http://www.plope.com/software/collector .

Author Information

Chris McDonough (chrism@plope.com)
"Agendaless Consulting":http://www.agendaless.com