Debian Init.d – Best Practices for Keeping Processes Alive

daemondebianinitinit.dstartup

I'm looking for a standard way or best practice to keep a daemon started by an init.d shell script alive.

Or even better, is there a way to keep it alive directly from /etc/init.d?

Specifically, I have a daemon called dtnd with and infinite loop that looks for unexpected ended process, if there are any, the daemon wake up them again. Also, I use the start-stop-daemon tool in order to let the precess by run from a given system user.

I want to run this dtnd daemon from startup. In order to achieve this behavior I created a init.d script that "wraps" the dtnd file using start, stop and status commands.

I have 2 questions that I will like to solve:

  1. Is there a way to achieve keeping alive some process from init.d shell script. Is an standard/best way practice?

  2. It's recommended to keep a process alive with infinite loop? I guess it's better to use some command like respawn to achieve that. It's correct?

I know about the existance of the respawn command. I think that's what I need but I don't understand the workflow between /etc/init.d/ and /etc/init. Can anyone help me?

Note that I don't have inittab neither upstart (I'm only allowed to use /etc/init, /etc/init.d, cron and system tools as start-stop-daemon. I mean, only the default tools)

Thank you so much for your time!

Best Answer

Debian will eventually have systemd, so this is the way to do it on a Linux system which uses systemd (and many do already; you might consider switching distributions).

Systemd can handle keeping the service alive for you automatically; no other tools are required. Simply make sure that Restart=always is set in the service file's [Service] section.

# vi /etc/systemd/system/dtnd.service

[Service]
Restart=always
#...everything else...

Several other options are available as well, for more complex scenarios.

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