Montreal Tech Watch

For sys-admins and ruby programmers, here’s raad, a new lightweight service wrapper, that allows you to daemonize your existing ruby code, and simplify operations.

Colin Surprenant (@colinsurprenant) didn’t find anything that offer this in a simple way, and that’s how raad was born. The ruby gem still in early release, but you can see here how simple it is to use:

require ‘raad’

class SimpleDaemon
def start
@stopped = false
while !@stopped
Raad::Logger.info(“simple_daemon running”)
sleep(1)
end
end

def stop
@stopped = true
Raad::Logger.info(“simple_daemon stopped”)
end
end

It’s certainly minimalistic, certainly on a different level from exisiting librairies requiring complex configuration, patching or even compiling.

raad is currently used by Needium startup in staging, and will be deployed soon in production, to help in infrastructure management. For anyone who is maintaining several servers and who need to launch (or restart) a variety of scripts at each install, it’s probably time to have a look at raad as well.