Python Daemon Packaging Best Practices

Question

I have a tool which I have written in python and generally should be run as a daemon. What are the best practices for packaging this tool for distribution, particularly how sho

Answer 1

This blog entry made it clear for me that there are actually two common ways to have your Python program run as a deamon (I hadn't figured that out so clearly from the existing answers):

There are two approaches to writing daemon applications like servers in Python.

• The first is to handle all the tasks of sarting and stopping daemons in Python code itself. The easiest way to do this is with the python-daemon package which might eventually make its way into the Python distribution.

Poeljapon's answer is an example of this 1st approach, although it doesn't use the python-daemon package, but links to a custom but very clean python script.

• The other approach is to use the tools supplied by the operating system. In the case of Debain, this means writing an init script which makes use of the start-stop-daemon program.

Ali Afshar's answer is a shell script example of the 2nd approach, using the start-stop-daemon.

The blog entry I quoted has a shell script example, and some additional details on things such as starting your daemon at system startup and restarting your daemon automatically when it stopped for any reason.