How do you create a daemon in Python?

Question

Searching on Google reveals x2 code snippets. The first result is to this code recipe which has a lot of documentation and explanation, along with some useful discussion und

Answer 1

I modified a few lines in Sander Marechal's code sample (mentioned by @JeffBauer in the accepted answer) to add a quit() method that gets executed before the daemon is stopped. This is sometimes very useful.

Here it is.

Note: I don't use the "python-daemon" module because the documentation is still missing (see also many other SO questions) and is rather obscure (how to start/stop properly a daemon from command line with this module?)

Answer 2

Probably not a direct answer to the question, but systemd can be used to run your application as a daemon. Here is an example:

[Unit]
Description=Python daemon
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=<run as user>
Group=<run as group group>
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python <python script home>/script.py

# Give the script some time to startup
TimeoutSec=300

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I prefer this method because a lot of the work is done for you, and then your daemon script behaves similarly to the rest of your system.

-Orby

Answer 3

YapDi is a relatively new python module that popped up in Hacker News. Looks pretty useful, can be used to convert a python script into daemon mode from inside the script.

Answer 4

Though you may prefer the pure Python solution provided by the python-daemon module, there is a daemon(3) function in libc -- at least, on BSD and Linux -- which will do the right thing.

Calling it from python is easy:

import ctypes

ctypes.CDLL(None).daemon(0, 0) # Read the man-page for the arguments' meanings

The only remaining thing to do is creation (and locking) of the PID-file. But that you can handle yourself...