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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T16:03:14+00:00

Part of my web application is a background script that polls from a beanstalkd

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Part of my web application is a background script that polls from a beanstalkd server and process data.

This script needs to run continuously (like a daemon). If it crashes, it needs to be started again. It also can’t be started twice (more precisely run twice).

As I want to ease the deployment and development process, I want to avoid using pcntl_fork. It’s not available on Windows, it necessitates recompiling PHP on Mac, sometimes on Linux too…

Can I do this simply using a bash script to launch the PHP script in background?

# verify that the script is not already running
...

/usr/bin/php myScript.php &

If I execute this batch with crontab every hour or so, my process should run continuously and be restarted in maximum one hour if it crashes?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Assuming blindly that you control the server(s) on which your scripts run, Supervisor is probably a good solution for you.

    It’s a process control daemon, written in Python. You can configure it to start your PHP script and keep it running. The PHP script itself doesn’t need to do anything special. No forking, no manual process control, nothing.

    On the other hand, you’ve also expressed concern about pcntl_fork not being available on Windows. If you’re really running this thing on Windows, Supervisor isn’t going to work out for you, as it isn’t Windows friendly. Keep in mind that Windows isn’t really friendly to Unix-style daemonization either, as it would want to control the daemon as a Service. While that’s possible, it’s not exactly an easy or elegant solution.

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