One important deployment task of server software is to not only deploy the software and then start it, but to enable it to be automatically started and monitored by the OS at future reboots. The most modern solution for this type of management is Upstart. You access Upstart every time you call “sudo service apache2 restart”, and whatnot. Upstart is sponsored by Ubuntu (more specifically, Canonical).

Upstart configs are located in /etc/init (we’re slowly, slowly approaching the point where we might one day be able to get rid of the System-V init scripts, in /etc/init.d). To create a job, you drop a “xyz.conf” file into /etc/init, and Upstart should automatically become aware of it via inotify. To query Upstart (including starting and stopping jobs), you emit a D-Bus message.

So, what about elegantly automating the creation of a job for the service from your Python deployment code? There is exactly one solution for doing so, and it’s a Swiss Army Knife for such a task.

We’re going to use the Python upstart library to build a job and then write it (in fact, we’re just going to share one of their examples, for your convenience). The library also allows for listing the jobs on the system, getting statuses, and starting/stopping jobs, among other things, but we’ll leave it to you to experiment with this, when you’re ready.

Build a job that starts and stops on the normal run-levels, respawns when it terminates, and runs a single command (a non-forking process, otherwise we’d have to add the ‘expect’ stanza as well):

from upstart.job import JobBuilder

jb = JobBuilder()

# Build the job to start/stop with default runlevels to call a command.
jb.description('My test job.').\
   author('Dustin Oprea <dustin@nowhere.com>').\
   start_on_runlevel().\
   stop_on_runlevel().\
   run('/usr/bin/my_daemon')

with open('/etc/init/my_daemon.conf', 'w') as f:
    f.write(str(jb))

Remember to run this as root. The job output looks like this:

description "My test job."
author "Dustin Oprea <dustin@nowhere.com>"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [016]
respawn 
exec /usr/bin/my_daemon