Running Unicorn with Upstart

If you are using unicorn to run your ruby apps then you’ve probably experimented with how to run it on your server.

Pains

You’ve probably tried the the normal foreman export, but it’s template is lacking in a couple of ways:

1. You must set your environment variables in the command string
2. You can’t use a initctl reload appname because that is the sh that starts things

Your upstart script looks something like this:

start on starting appname
stop on stopping appname
respawn

exec su - app -c 'cd /var/www/appname; export PORT=5200; export REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/2;  export RAILS_ENV=production;  export QUEUE=appname;  bin/unicorn -c config/unicorn.rb >> /var/www/appname/shared/log/web-1.log 2>&1'

Pleasure

I’ve found a way around those pain points using start-stop-daemon. My upstart script looks like this:

start on starting appname
stop on stopping appname
respawn

env RBENV_ROOT="/usr/local/rbenv"
env PATH="/usr/local/rbenv/shims:/usr/local/rbenv/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
env PORT=5200
env REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/2
env RAILS_ENV=production
env QUEUE=appname

exec start-stop-daemon --start -c app -d /var/www/appname -x /var/www/appname/bin/unicorn -- -c /var/www/appname/config/unicorn.rb >> /var/log/appname/web.log 2>&1

This gets the env definitions out of the startup string, and also gives upstart the proper pid to do a reload. Thought I’d share.

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