Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
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Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#2Runit is amazing. I've used it on several large scale websites with great success. Runit follows the unix philosophy of being stupid simple and doing one thing incredibly well. If you're starting up a new project, consider using Runit.
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#3Runit is / was awesome but how is this news?
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#4Runit is amazing. I've used it on several large scale websites with great success. Runit follows the unix philosophy of being stupid simple and doing one thing incredibly well. If you're starting up a new project, consider using Runit.
Not only is it simple and does the do-the-one-thing-well thing well, which is true, it's also _correct_. It's hard to overstate how valuable runit is in production because of that. It does the right thing with regard to clearing the environment, detaching from controlling terminal, logging, and many other subtle aspects of operating a service. I never worry about runit.
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#5Given the other glowing comments, maybe this would be a place to ask: should I bother with Upstart, or Systemd? I see Shuttleworth announced the move to systemd, but it's not available on Ubuntu 14.04 servers right now. I'm writing provisioning for our production fleet, what should I use?
The vagaries of the OS wars make something like Runit tempting.
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#6Given the other glowing comments, maybe this would be a place to ask: should I bother with Upstart, or Systemd? I see Shuttleworth announced the move to systemd, but it's not available on Ubuntu 14.04 servers right now. I'm writing provisioning for our production fleet, what should I use? The vagaries of the OS wars make something like Runit tempting.
There's no way of answering that question without knowing your exact requirements.
However, if you want to preserve the extreme flexibility of the daemontools approach, but with a workflow that is systemd-like (even converting systemd unit files to native service bundles), check out the nosh project: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwar...
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#7Runit is / was awesome but how is this news?
Many people still think that it's a 3-way horse race between sysvinit, Upstart, and systemd (which systemd has all but won). The Debian technical committee certainly acted like that was the case last year.
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#8Nice to see daemontools-inspired work on HN in the past few days. I've been using runit for years, and as other comments have said, it's just not something I ever have to worry about. When I look around at other solutions it seems like I'd be taking a huge step back (making things more complex with arguably less usefulness).
I've been meaning to do some blog posts about runit, as it seems like it sits on the back-burner in general. Does anyone know how actively it's maintained, or has it just reached such stability that it doesn't need much maintenance? It would neat to see it on github with some real docs and such.
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#9Given the other glowing comments, maybe this would be a place to ask: should I bother with Upstart, or Systemd? I see Shuttleworth announced the move to systemd, but it's not available on Ubuntu 14.04 servers right now. I'm writing provisioning for our production fleet, what should I use? The vagaries of the OS wars make something like Runit tempting.
Depends heavily on what you need to provision, and whether you can select your provisioned environment based on what you want to support. Upstart is, at this point, effectively dead for any future distribution. However, if you want to support existing Ubuntu LTS distributions for the remainder of their lifetime, you'll need to handle it. Similarly, if you want to support the current rounds of enterprise distributions, you still need to support sysvinit. And if you have any non-Linux systems, you'll need to handle whatever they use as well.
On the other hand, if you can ensure that your production systems all run relatively recent Linux distributions, you can safely assume systemd. Which specific distributions you have in production will determine the oldest version of systemd you have to support; since new features get added regularly, you'll want to know the oldest version you can assume.
What are you trying to provision, and what requirements do you have?
Re: Runit – a Unix init scheme with service supervision
#10I use GNU dmd instead. Simple and very extensible with Scheme. I use it as PID 1 on 2 of my machines, but I use another instance of it as a user service manager on all of my machines. I've also been meaning to replace runit with dmd in Phusion's passenger-docker image to get something more hackable.