start a background process with nohup using fabric

Question

am trying to start a celerycam process using fabric using the below nohup command. Unfortunately, nothing is happening, manually using the same command i could start the pro

Answer 1

I was able to circumvent this issue by running nohup ... & over ssh in a separate local shell script. In fabfile.py:

@task
def startup():
    local('./do-stuff-in-background.sh {0}'.format(env.host))

and in do-stuff-in-background.sh:

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -o nounset

HOST=$1

ssh $HOST -T << HERE
   nohup df -h 1>>~/df.log 2>>~/df.err &
HERE

Of course, you could also pass in the command and standard output / error log files as arguments to make this script more generally useful.

(In my case, I didn't have admin rights to install dtach, and neither screen -d -m nor pty=False / sleep 1 worked properly for me. YMMV, especially as I have no idea why this works...)