Question

On a linux box I’ve got a python script that’s always started from predefined user. It may take a while for it to finish so I want to allow other users to stop it from the web.

Using kill fails with Operation not permitted.

Can I somehow modify my long running python script so that it’ll recive a signal from another user? Obviously, that another user is the one that starts a web server.

May be there’s entirely different way to approach this problem I can’t think of right now.

Answer 1

If you set up your python script to run as a deamon (bottom of page under Unix Daemon) on your server (which sounds appropriate), and you give the apache user permissions to execute the init.d script for the service, then you can control the service with php code similar to this (from here – the service script name in this case is ‘otto2’):

<? 
$otto = "/usr/etc/init.d/otto2 "; 

if( $_GET["action"] ) { 
    $ret = shell_exec( $otto.$_GET["action"] ); 
    //Check your ret value  
} 
else { 
    ?> 
    <a href="<?=$PHP_SELF?>?action=start">Start  </a> 
    <a href="<?=$PHP_SELF?>?action=stop">Stop  </a> 
    <? 
} 

?>

The note on that is ‘really basic untested code’ 🙂