persistent process supervision

welcome

Welcome to perp, aka "the perpetrator": a persistent process supervisor and service managment framework for un!x.

Quick, grab the latest release now: perp-2.07.tar.gz, 2013.01.11.

Then check out what else you can do here:

download the latest sources
browse the manual online
skim the README and INSTALL notes from the distribution
big CHANGES!
check out the links for more information
oh, and be sure to oogle over the screenshots!

Or read on...

about

The perp package provides a set of daemons and utilities to reliably start, monitor, log, and control a collection of persistent processes.

A "persistent process" is any program intended to be long-running, highly available, and purpose critical. Also known and often described as a "service", a persistent process normally provides some essential, on-demand system service. Programs that serve email, domain name queries, and http requests are all examples of services that are normally run as persistent processes.

These are the programs that you want to start at system boot, and to continue running for as long as the system itself. These are the programs you need running in uninterrupted service, day and night, forever and ever.

perp helps make sure that they do.

benefits

perp provides the following benefits:

easy, portable, platform-neutral service installation
fast, asynchronous service startup
consistent, reliable service execution environment
easy administration
reliable and complete logging facilities

perp is similar in purpose to the venerable daemontools program last released in 2001, but provides a modern update with many advantages:

easy configuration: in place service activation and no symlinks!
single process: context switching for multiple supervisors is eliminated
everthing administered in one place, /etc/perp
service reset capability
fully FHS compatible
colorized(!) service lister, readable timestamps...
no slashpackage, no slashcommand, no slashdoc...

Meanwhile, perp continues to share many of the positive attributes of daemontools:

small, portable, autoconf-less, standard C89/posix sources
daemons never malloc()
make(1) agnostic
links with dietlibc for small executables

And the author is even friendly!