Running PostgreSQL with Supervisord

Question

I want to run PostgreSQL 9.1 using Supervisor on Ubuntu 10.04. At the moment, I manually start PostgreSQL using the init script:

/etc/init.d/postgresql start
         


        

Answer 1

The blog post is rather badly written. There is no "TCP mode": the post's suggested method will still listen on a Unix socket, just in a different directory. Comments in the post such as "external pid file - not needed for TCP mode" are very misleading.

postmaster is the traditional name for the postgresql executable (to distinguish the master dispatching process from the backend slaves). For some time now there has been no separate executable, and now it is installed as simply "postgres".

Assuming that Supervisor is broadly simliar to the qmail/daemontools supervise scheme, it would be entirely possible (in fact, quite normal) to have it run a script that sets up the directories and environment, and then execs postgres with the requisite arguments (or propagates arguments given to the wrapper script, which would be unusual with supervise but makes more sense when you have a config file to put arguments into).

The way supervise worked (and I'm going to continue to assume "Supervisor" is the same) is to have the supervisor process run a subprocess as specified, and simply relaunch a new subprocess if it exits. This is based on the idea that the process being launched is a long-lived daemon process that only exits when something goes badly wrong, and that simply restarting it is a valid fix. By contrast, init scripts such as in /etc/init.d run the subprocess and detach it, and return control to their caller- if the subprocess exits, nothing special happens, and it must be restarted manually. If you tried to simply run /etc/init.d/postgresql start from supervise, it would continuously keep spawning postgresql daemons, as the return from the init script would be interpreted as the daemon process having exited, when in fact it had been started and detached.