daemondo defeats purpose of launchd?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 1, 2007, at 11:47, Chris Pickel wrote:

> On 01 Sep, 2007, at 4:35, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> I have this problem: the lighttpd web server on my MacBook Pro  
>> unexpectedly dies rather frequently (much more frequently than it  
>> did on my PowerBook). When this happens, the daemondo process is  
>> still there, and I have to use launchctl to unload and then load  
>> the lighttpd plist to get the server running again.
>>
>> The point of launchd is that it notices when processes  
>> unexpectedly quit, and restarts them automatically so close to no  
>> downtime is observed. But launchd is monitoring daemondo, which  
>> does not exit, so launchd does not restart anything. And daemondo  
>> doesn't seem to have the same process-death-noticing feature so  
>> daemondo is not automatically restarting the failed lighttpd.
>
> Agreed. I try to avoid daemondo when possible. When it isn't  
> possible, daemondo is an indispensable tool, but it turns out that  
> for most cases, it's possible to avoid it. I've written many  
> launchd scripts on my own, several of which I've put online [1].
>
> It's possible to make launchd scripts similar to these in MacPorts  
> via startupitem.executable, but currently, the startupitem.*  
> commands in MacPorts do not support setting the "User" key. For  
> lighttpd, that's not necessary; it starts as root so it can listen  
> on the privileged port 80, then drops privileges. For mysql,  
> though, it's pretty important.

Thanks, I didn't even know about startupitem.executable. According to  
the new guide, it's the preferred startupitem method, but only 10  
ports currently use it! I'll have to look into it.