Question

I have a process I’d like to be able to run in the background by starting up a Gearman Client any time.

I’ve found success by opening up two SSH connections to my server, and in one starting the worker and in the other then running the client. This produces the desired output.

The problem is that, I’d like to have a worker constantly running in the background so I can just call up a client whenever I need to have the process done. But as soon as I close the terminal which has the worker PHP file running, a call to the client does not work – the worker seems to die.

Is there a way to have the worker run constantly in the background, so calling a new client will work without having to start up a new worker?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want a program to keep running even after its parent is dead (i.e. you’ve closed your terminal), you must invoke it with nohup :

nohup your-command &

Quoting the relevant Wikipedia page I linked to :

nohup is a POSIX command to ignore
the HUP (hangup) signal, enabling
the command to keep running after the
user who issues the command has logged
out.
The HUP (hangup) signal is
by convention the way a terminal warns
depending processes of logout.

For another (possibly more) interesting solution, see the following article : Dæmonize Your PHP.

It points to Supervisord, which makes sures a process is still running, relaunching it if necessary.