How to make sure an application keeps running on Linux

Question

I\'m trying to ensure a script remains running on a development server. It collates stats and provides a web service so it\'s supposed to persist, yet a few times a day, it

Answer 1

I couldn't get Chris Wendt solution to work for some reason, and it was hard to debug. This one is pretty much the same but easier to debug, excludes bash from the pattern matching. To debug just run: bash ./root/makerun-mysql.sh. In the following example with mysql-server just replace the value of the variables for process and makerun for your process.

• Create a BASH-script like this (nano /root/makerun-mysql.sh):

#!/bin/bash
process="mysql"
makerun="/etc/init.d/mysql restart"
if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep -v bash | grep --quiet $process
then
    printf "Process '%s' is running.\n" "$process"
    exit
else
    printf "Starting process '%s' with command '%s'.\n" "$process" "$makerun"
    $makerun
fi
exit

• Make sure it's executable by adding proper file permissions (i.e. chmod 700 /root/makerun-mysql.sh)

• Then add this to your crontab (crontab -e):

# Keep processes running every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * bash /root/makerun-mysql.sh