From: Thomas Uehlinger <uehli@...>
Date: 2005-02-08T21:40:12+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Daemons 0.0.1: control your daemon scripts with start/stop commands

I'm proud to release the first version of Daemons,
a tool to create scripts that run as daemons in the background and that can
be controlled by start/stop/restart commands (using pid-files).

Get it while it's hot as a gem ('gem install daemons') or from
http://rubyforge.org/projects/daemons or read on...

-- Thomas Uehlinger


From the README:
== What is Daemons?

Daemons provides an easy way to wrap existing ruby scripts (for example a
self-written server) to be <i>run as a daemon</i> and to be <i>controlled
by simple start/stop/restart commands</i>.

Daemons includes the <tt>daemonize.rb</tt> script written by <i>Travis
Whitton</i> to do the daemonization
process.

== Basic Usage

Layout: suppose you have your self-written server <tt>myserver.rb</tt>:

  # this is myserver.rb
  # it does nothing really useful at the moment
  
  loop do
    sleep(5)
  end
  
To use <tt>myserver.rb</tt> in a production environment, you need to be able
to run <tt>myserver.rb</tt> in the _background_ (this means detach it from
the console, fork it in the background, release any directories and file
descriptors).

Just create <tt>myserver_control.rb</tt> like this:

  # this is myserver_control.rb
  
  require 'rubygems'        # if you use RubyGems
  require 'daemons'
  
  Daemons.run('myserver.rb')
  
And use it like this from the console:

  $ ruby myserver_control.rb start
      (myserver.rb is now running in the background)
  $ ruby myserver_control.rb restart
      (...)
  $ ruby myserver_control.rb stop
  
For testing purposes you can even run <tt>myserver.rb</tt> <i>without
forking</i> in the background:

  $ ruby myserver_control.rb run

An additional nice feature of Daemons is that you can pass <i>additional
arguments</i> to the script that 
should be daemonized by seperating them by two _hyphens_:
  
  $ ruby myserver_control.rb start -- --file=anyfile --a_switch
another_argument
  
For further documentation, refer to the module documentation of Daemons.

  
== Download and Installation

*Download*: just go to http://rubyforge.org/projects/daemons/

Installation *with* RubyGems:
  $ su
  # gem install daemons
  
Installation *without* RubyGems:
  $ tar xfz daemons-x.x.x.tar.gz
  $ cd daemons-x.x.x
  $ su
  # ruby setup.rb
  
== Documentation

For further documentation, refer to the module documentation of Daemons
(click on Daemons).

The RDoc documentation is also online at http://daemons.rubyforge.org


== Author

Written in 2005 by Thomas Uehlinger <mailto:th.uehlinger@gmx.ch>

== License

The Daemons script is copywrited free software by Thomas Uehlinger
<mailto:th.uehlinger@gmx.ch>. You can redistribute it under the terms
specified in
the COPYING file of the Ruby distribution.


== Feedback and other resources

At http://rubyforge.org/projects/daemons.