Starting & Monitoring

Finit can start and monitor the following types of daemons:

• Forks to background, creates a PID file
• Runs in foreground and signals ready by:
• creating a PID file
• does not create a PID file -- Finit can create it for you (optional)
• other mechanism (systemd, s6)

Finit can not start and monitor a daemon that:

• Forks to background and does not create a PID file

	Forking	Creates PID File	Finit creates PID File
✔	Yes	Yes	No
✔	No	Yes	No
✔	No	No	Yes, optionally
✘	Yes	No	No

Note

PID files is one mechanism used to assert conditions to synchronize the start and stop of other, dependent, services. Other mechanisms are described in the Service Synchronization section.

Forks to bg w/ PID file

There are two variants. The former names the pidfile to watch, as for sysv start/stop scripts, and the latter is inspired by systemd, with a twist -- it lets Finit guess the pidfile based on the standard path and the basename of the command.

service serv {
    description = "Forking service, type 1"
    pidfile     = "/run/serv.pid"
    command     = "serv"
}

service serv {
    description = "Forking service, type 2"
    type        = "forking"
    command     = "serv"
}

In this example the resulting files to watch for are /run/serv.pid and /var/run/serv.pid, respectively. On most modern Linux systems this is the same directory (/var/run is a symlink to ../run).

Runs in fg w/ PID file

service serv {
    description = "Foreground service w/ PID file"
    command     = "serv -n -p"
}

Runs in fg w/o PID file

Same as previous, but we tell Finit to create the PID file, because we need it to synchronize start/stop of a dependent service.

service serv {
    description    = "Foreground service w/o PID file"
    pidfile        = "/run/serv.pid"
    pidfile-create = true
    command        = "serv -n"
}

Runs in fg w/ custom PID file

service serv {
    description = "Foreground service w/ custom PID file"
    pidfile     = "/run/servy.pid"
    command     = "serv -n -p -P /run/servy.pid"
}