Let child processes in Python suicide if they became orphans.
pip install orphanage
Don't forget to put it in setup.py
/ requirements.txt
.
from orphanage import exit_when_orphaned
exit_when_orphaned()
Some application server softwares (e.g. Gunicorn) work on a multiple-process architect which we call the master-worker model. They must clean up the worker processes if the master process is stopped, to prevent them from becoming orphan processes.
In the gevent-integration scene, the worker processes of Gunicorn poll their
ppid
in an user thread (a.k.a greenlet) to be orphan-aware. But the user
thread may be hanged once the master process crashed because of the blocked
writing on a pipe, the communicating channel between master process and
worker processes.
We want to perform this ppid
polling in a real kernel thread. That is the
intent of this library.
This library spawns an internal thread to poll the ppid
at regular
intervals (for now it is one second). Once the ppid
changed, the original
parent process should be dead and the current process should be orphaned. The
internal thread will send SIGTERM
to the current process.
In the plan, the prctl
& SIGHUP
pattern may be introduced in Linux
platforms to avoid from creating threads. For now, the only supported strategy
is the ppid
polling, for being portable.
CaoE is an alternative to this library which developed by the Douban Inc. It
uses prctl
and a twice-forking pattern. It has a pure Python implementation
without any C extension compiling requirement. If you don't mind to twist the
process tree, that will be a good choice too.
If you want to report bugs or request features, please feel free to open issues on GitHub.
Of course, pull requests are always welcome.