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Bug: Background doesn't work as expected, should be deprecated and eventually removed #332
Description
sshkit/lib/sshkit/backends/abstract.rb
Line 59 in 6c81f53
The problem is that background simply nohup and backgrounds the process using the shell's job control &. More often than not, badly behaved daemons still block.
There's many hoops to jump through to ensure that your process behaves well when backgrounded, forked, nohupped, etc - and we can't whitelist programs that do it well, and blacklist those that can't.
Discussion is welcome, but I do think that background() should be removed from the DSL.
Activity
mattbrictson commentedon Feb 22, 2016
I agree. IMHO daemons should be managed by the init process, not by Capistrano deploy tasks. The
backgroundmethod is encouraging bad practice.leehambley commentedon Feb 22, 2016
Exactly, there's some legacy here, it used to be used for mongrel
script/runner, and if you monitor a service with something like Monit, then starting it with Capistrano does make sense, sometimes.maxwxzheng commentedon Aug 31, 2016
What's the suggested way to execute a command in background? Or is it discouraged?
mattbrictson commentedon Sep 9, 2016
@maxwxzheng It is discouraged. SSHKit is typically used to deploy long-running processes, like app servers or job processors. In such a scenario, simply firing off the command in the background and hoping it stays running is not a good idea. What if the process dies? What if the server is rebooted? Instead, you should use a process manager like systemd which handles these things for you.