Managing launchd

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 2, 2009, at 11:06, Panagiotis Atmatzidis wrote:

> I have a mac mini G4 that acts as a server on my home LAN offering  
> services (dns, http, AFP, etc).
>
> I've installed dnsmasq but I don't know how to make launchd start  
> dnsmasq on boot. I understand that this has something to do with  
> launchd but I could not find any documentation on how to do it.

You may want to install (the older Tiger version of) Lingon, which is  
a GUI for managing launchd. You may find this more comfortable than  
typing launchd commands in the Terminal.


> My second issue is that when I've installed lighttpd, I did a quick  
> configuration on the lighttpd.conf in order to make it work. I copy  
> and paste at the terminal the command line in order to start the  
> demon via launchd at boot something like this:
>
> sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/ 
> org.macports.lighttpd.plist
>
> Now the problem is that while, I can clearly see that lighttpd  
> doesn't bind any port(!) is running and apparently every time I  
> kill the process it starts by itself, so at this point I don't have  
> control over this. How can manage this situation? I want to  
> configure it first and the put it at startup. Here's what I'm  
> talking about:
>
> devo:/opt/local/etc atma$ ps auwx|grep -i lighttpd
> root     23921   0.0  0.1    27956    780  ??  Ss    6:57PM    
> 0:00.01 /opt/local/bin/daemondo --label=lighttpd --start-cmd /opt/ 
> local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.lighttpd/lighttpd.wrap
> atma     23937   0.0  0.0    27812      4  p4  R+    7:05PM    
> 0:00.00 grep -i lighttpd


As you see above, lighttpd is not in fact running. daemondo (the  
MacPorts launchd helper program) is running, but lighttpd itself is  
not. What probably happened is that launchd started daemondo, which  
started lighttpd, which noticed a problem with its configuration  
file, printed an error message (which you could not see) and quit. I  
use lighttpd too so I have experienced this as well. Before getting  
lighttpd running with launchd, you may just want to run the lighttpd  
executable yourself in the Terminal. If there is an error in the  
config file, you will be able to see the error message that way. Once  
you have your config file correct (and indeed the sample config file  
the MacPorts lighttpd port installs is awful and needs to be  
massively rewritten; I believe there is a ticket open on this), then  
you can stop your manually-started lighttpd in the Terminal and use  
launchd to keep it up.

Note that the MacPorts lighttpd launchd plist will not in fact keep  
lighttpd running if it crashes. This is also a bug in how the port is  
set up, and there should be a ticket for that as well.

The maintainer of the lighttpd port hasn't been doing much with it,  
so these issues are unlikely to get fixed by him. I have wanted to  
fix them, but have not been sufficiently motivated. If you would like  
to supply patches to fix any of these or any other issues you  
encounter with lighttpd in MacPorts that would be appreciated.