I have a python script that continuously process new data and writes to a mongodb. In the script, its a while loop and a sleep that runs the code continuously.
What is the recommended way to run the Python script forever, logging errors when they occur, and restarting when it crashes?
Will node.js's forever be suitable? I'm also running node/meteor on the same Ubuntu server.
supervisord is perfect for this sort of thing. While I used to check that programs were still running every couple of minutes with a cron job, supervisord runs all programs in an in-process thread, so in the event your program terminates, supervisord will automatically restart the process. I no longer need to parse the output of ps to see if a program crashed.
It has a simple declaritive config file and configurable logging. By default it creates a log file for your-program-name-stderr.log your-program-name-stdout.log which are automatically handled by logrotate when supervisord is installed from an OS package manager (Debian for me).
If you don't want to configure supervisord's logging, you should look at logging in python so you can control what goes into those files.
if you're on a debian derivative you should be able to install and start the daemon simply by executing apt-get install supervisord as root.
The config file is very straightforward too:
[program:myprogram]
command=/path/to/my/program/script
directory=/path/to/my/program/base
user=myuser
autostart=true
autorestart=true
redirect_stderr=True
supervisorctl also allows you to see what your program is doing interactively and can start and stop multiple programs with supervisorctl start myprogram etc
Recently wrote something similar. The basic pattern I follow is
while True:
try:
#functionality
except SpecificError:
#log exception
except: #catch everything else
finally:
time.sleep(600)
to handle reboots you can use init.d or cron jobs.
If you are writing a daemon, you should probably do it with this command:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man8/start-stop-daemon.8.html
You can spawn this from a System V /etc/init.d/ script, or use Upstart which is slowly replacing it.
Upstart: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/getting-started.html
System V: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-write-sys-v-init-script-to-start-stop-service.html
I find System V easier to write, but if this will ever be packaged and distributed in a debian file, I recommend writing an Upstart conf.
Definitely keep the sleep so it won't keep a grip on CPU load.
I don't know if this is still relevant to you, but I have been reading forever about how to do this and want to share somewhere what I did.
For me, the goal was to have a python script running always (on my Linux computer). The python script also has a "while True " loop in it which should theoretically run forever, but if it for any reason I cannot think of would crash, I want the script to restart. Also, when I restart the computer it should run the script.
I am not an expert but for me the best and most understandable was to use systemd (assuming you use Linux).
There are two nice examples of how to do this given here and here, showing how to write your .service files in either /etc/systemd/system or /lib/systemd/system. If you want to be completely correct you should take the former:
" /etc/systemd/system/: units installed by the system administrator" 1
The documentation of systemd here is actually nice to read, even if you are not an expert.
Hope this helps someone!
Related
I have some python scripts that I look to run daily form a Windows PC.
My current workflow is:
The desktop PC stays all every day except for a weekly restart over the weekend
After the restart I open VS Code and run a little bash script ./start.sh that kicks off the tasks.
The above works reasonably fine, but it is also fairly painful. I need to re-run start.sh if I ever close VS Code (eg. for an update). Also the processes use some local python libraries so I need to stop them if I'm going to update them.
With regards to how to do this properly, 4 tools came to mind:
Windows Scheduler
Airflow
Prefect (https://www.prefect.io/)
Rocketry (https://rocketry.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)
However, I can't quite get my head around the fundamental issue that Prefect/Airflow/Rocketry run on my PC then there is nothing that will restart them after the PC reboots. I'm also not sure they will give me the isolation I'd prefer on these tools.
Docker came to mind, I could put each task into a docker image and run them via some form of docker swarm or something like that. But not sure if I'm re-inventing the wheel.
I'm 100% sure I'm not the first person in this situation. Could anyone point me to a guide on how this could be done well?
Note:
I am not considering running the python scripts in the cloud. They interact with local tools that are only licenced for my PC.
You can definitely use Prefect for that - it's very lightweight and seems to be matching what you're looking for. You install it with pip install prefect, start Orion API server: prefect orion start and once you create a Deployment, and start an agent prefect agent start -q default you can even configure schedule from the UI
For more information about Deployments, check our FAQ section.
It sounds Rocketry could also be suitable. Rocketry can shut down itself using a task. You could do a task that:
Runs on the main thread and process (blocking starting new tasks)
Waits or terminates all the currently running tasks (use the session)
Calls session.shut_down() which sets a flag to the scheduler.
There is also a app configuration shut_cond which is simply a condition. If this condition is True, the scheduler exits so alternatively you can use this.
Then after the line app.run() you simply have a line that runs shutdown -r (restart) command on shell using a subprocess library, for example. Then you need something that starts Rocketry again when the restart is completed. For this, perhaps this could be an answer: https://superuser.com/a/954957, or use Windows scheduler to have a simple startup task that starts Rocketry.
Especially if you had Linux machines (Raspberry Pis for example), you could integrate Rocketry with FastAPI and make a small cluster in which Rocketry apps communicate with each other, just put script with Rocketry as a startup service. One machine could be a backup that calls another machine's API which runs Linux restart command. Then the backup executes tasks until the primary machine answers to requests again (is up and running).
But as the author of the library, I'm possibly biased toward my own projects. But Rocketry very capable on complex scheduling problems, that's the purpose of the project.
You can use schtasks for windows to schedule the tasks like running bash script or python script and it's pretty reliable too.
I have a python3.9 script I want to have running 24/7. In it, I use python-daemon to keep it running like so:
import daemon
with daemon.DaemonContext():
%%script%%
And it works fine but after a few hours or days, it just crashes randomly. I always start it with sudo but I can't seem to figure out where to find the log file of the daemon process for debugging. What can I do to ensure logging? How can I keep the script running or auto-restart it after crashing?
You can find the full code here.
If you really want to run a script 24/7 in background, the cleanest and easiest way to do it would surely be to create a systemd service.
There are already many descriptions of how to do that, for example here.
One of the advantages of systemd, in addition to being able to launch a service at startup, is to be able to restart it after failure.
Restart=on-failure
If all you want to do is automatically restart the program after a crash, the easiest method would probably be to use a bash script.
You can use the until loop, which is used to execute a given set of commands as long as the given condition evaluates to false.
#!/bin/bash
until python /path/to/script.py; do
echo "The program crashed at `date +%H:%M:%S`. Restarting the script..."
done
If the command returns a non zero exit-status, then the script is restarted.
I would start with familiarizing myself with those two questions:
How to make a Python script run like a service or daemon in Linux
Run a python script with supervisor
Looks like you need a supervisor that will make sure that your script/daemon is still running. You can take a look at supervisord.
I am working on Ubuntu 16.04 and I have a python running process in the background
python myFunction.py
From time to time, myFunction process gets killed for unknown reason, however, I want to restart it automatically. I have multiple python process running in the background, and I do not know which one runs myFunctions.py (e.g. by using the pgrep command).
Is it possible? Can I make a bash or python script to restart the command python myFunction.py whenever the python process running it gets killed?
You can look at Supervisord which is (from its own documentation) :
a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a
number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems
Supervisord will keep your script in check. If it crashes, it will restart it again. If your raspberry reboots it will make sure the scripts starts automically after booting.
It works based on a config file formatted like this (more info in the docs) :
[program:myFunction]
command=/path_to_script/myFunction.py
autostart=true
autorestart=true
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/myFunction.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/myFunction.error.log
directory=/path_to_script
I hope this will help you
I've written a lot of python scripts. Now I want to run it on another computer which running non-stop to crawling, analyzing data and update to an sql database.
Normally I open a command prompt and run the scripts:
python [script directory]
But with many scripts I have to open many cmd and every script call an python interpreter, so It end up with huge mess using a lot of memory.
What should I do to manage these scripts.
You haven't specified what OS your server is, but assuming that it's a Linux server you should probably research a process management tool such as Supervisord or Systemd. These are tools designed to run and monitor your program automatically, and even restart it if it crashes.
If you're using Ubuntu 16.04 then it comes with Systemd out of the box, however I personally find Supervisord easier to configure and use for simple tasks.
These programs won't necessarily help with your memory consumption issues however. Sure you can place caps on memory use for a process, but that's not really going to help you if it stops your program from working. You're probably best to re-evaluate your code and look for ways to reduce its memory footprint or use a server with more ram.
EDIT:
You've just added that the OS is Windows 10, which makes the above irrelevant. You can use the Windows Task Scheduler to automatically execute long running tasks.
you can use pythonw *.py , and it will run in background.
I have a python script I use at work that checks the contents of a webpage and reports to me the changes. It used to run fine checking the site every 5 minutes and then our company switched some security software. The script will still run but will stop after an hour or so. Its not consistent, it will sometimes be a few hours but about an hour seems average. There are no errors raised that are reported in the shell. Is there a way to have this re-started automatically? The code is below, it used to just call the function and then a sleep command, but I added the for loop and the print line for debugging to see what time it is stopping.
import time
import datetime
import txtWip
while True:
txtWip.main()
for i in range(1, 300,100):
current_time = time.strftime(r"%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S", time.localtime())
print(current_time)
time.sleep(100)
What you want is for your program to run as a daemon[1]: a background process that no longer responds to ordinary SIGKILL or even SIGHUP. You also want this daemon to restart itself on termination - effectively making it run forever.
Rather than write your own daemon script, it's far easier to do one of the following:
If on Linux, use Upstart.
This is a replacement for the init.d daemon that supervises all processes while your machine running. It is capable of respawning a process in the event of an unexpected crash - see an example here, and a Python-specific example here. It is the gold standard for such tasks on this platform.
For certain Ubuntu releases, systemd is the prodigal son and should be used instead.
An alternative with an external bash script that doesn't require messing around with upstart is also a possibility.
If on Windows, use ReStartMe
If on Mac, install and configure runit appropriately
[1] The following is not cross-platform advice. You may or may not actually need to run this as a true daemon. A simple background job (i.e. invoked by appending an & when you run python <file_name>.py to the end) should be sufficient - this will quit when the terminal you ran it in quits, but you can get around this by using the Linux utility screen.