All My Brain

A few of the web applications I am hosting/developing are written with TurboGears which uses Cherrypy as its applications server. I have a couple things that need fixed for hosting CherryPy web applications on my Gentoo systems. First, there are no init scripts for CherryPy. Second, I’m running mulitple web applications per machine. I run them as different users with virtual python environments to keep web applications stepping on each others toes.

You can customize the logging for a TurboGears application to have not logging to standard out, but you still have to deal with the python CherryPy process not running as a daemon. I chose rather to run the application in a screen session.

First, a quick script to start my web application in its virtual python environment in my web applications directory.
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/home/<myuser>/bin:$PATH
cd `dirname $0`
./start-<mywebapp>.py prod.cfg


And next, a real simply startup script that starts and stops the application in a screen session.

#!/sbin/runscript
depend() {
need net
}
start() {
su -l $APPUSER -c "screen -S $SESS_NAME -d -m /$APP_DIR/$SCRIPT_NAME"
}
stop() {
su -l $APPUSER -c "screen -S $SESS_NAME -X kill"
}


The variables can go in /etc/conf.d/<app_name> where the <app_name> is the same name as the init.d script. They will automatically be sourced and passed to the init script. For more information on Gentoo init scripts, check here.