Using Supervisord Web Interface And Plugin

In my last article where I tried to give an introduction and basic usage of supervisord process monitoring, I figured that there are two missing features there which someone should know about/be aware of. Which are, interacting with supervisord web interface and using a plugin with supervisord.

So, today, In this small article, I will try to cover these two to make your supervisord experience easier/better. Let’s start with the built-in web interface.

Supervisord Web Interface:

To access the basic web interface, edit the supervisord configuration file(located at /etc/supervisord.conf) in the following section:

[inet_http_server]         ; inet (TCP) server disabled by default
port=127.0.0.1:9001        ; (ip_address:port specifier, *:port for all iface)
;username=user              ; (default is no username (open server))
;password=123               ; (default is no password (open server))
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

You have to comment out the first two-line to get it working. After that, run the supervisord in no daemon mode(with -n param) and you should be able to see something like the below in the console log:

2014-07-08 05:25:40,558 CRIT Server 'inet_http_server' running without any HTTP authentication checking
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Which means that it started properly. Now, test the web interface at http://127.0.0.1:9001 URL, which will look something like the below:

As you can see on the screenshot, you can start/stop/restart, see status, log etc right from your browser. Pretty cool! Isn’t it?

Third-Party Web Interface:

There are some available third-party web interfaces available which might be helpful to integrate into a web application. You can find details about them on supervisord third-party libraries page. Besides easy integration with a web application, some of them also facilitate monitoring more than one server from a single web interface, which is useful in many cases.

Using Plugin:

To use a plugin for additional functionality to our existing supervisord installation, it can be easily configurable via the same configuration file.

A very useful package is superlance. It is a plugin that includes a few very useful plugins for supervisord. I will show you one example configuration for the ‘memmon’ plugin here. ‘Memmon’ is a plugin that monitors the memory used by the processes and can restart the processes as soon as they go beyond the given boundary size.

After having “superlance” on system, edit the configuration file as below for the “memmon” plugin:

[eventlistener:memmon]
command=memmon -p my-bg-tasks=170MB -m yourname@domain.com
events=TICK_60

The above configuration will cause “memmon” to monitor memory usage over 170MB and restart it goes beyond that. It also attaches an event to send a signal every 60 seconds. Now, if the configuration is OK, after starting the supervisord again, with no daemon mode(with -n param), you should see something similar to the following line on the std log:

2014-07-08 05:25:41,564 INFO spawned: 'memmon' with pid 1600
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

To test this, try to keep the memory allowance low and feed your worker process with large data; you should eventually see that the worker restarted with a separate process id.

Final Words:

So, I hope this article will be helpful to you to some extent. You are most welcome to question/ provide feedback/suggestions via comments. Keep in touch!