Supervisor as a Platform

We’ll begin with a brief introduction to Supervisor; the benefits of running processes under it; and features like restarting failed processes, log rotation, command line control, and the web interface.

We will explain the important bits of Supervisor’s design and implementation as a Python program. We will talk about how you can extend the base features in powerful ways using your own simple Python programs, and why you’d want to do this.

Specifically, we’ll discuss how the Supervisor extension points can be tied together with your own programs to make a powerful Python deployment platform that can do much more than just restart failed processes.

We will focus the discussion on these features and how to leverage them.

• Using the built-in XML-RPC interface to control Supervisor remotely from your own programs.
• Extending the built-in XML-RPC interface using your own Python packages. We’ll look at the mechanics of building a simple package, how to register it, and how your own packages can hook into the Supervisor core functionality. We will examine two extension packages and see what they can offer.
• Using Supervisor’s event notification system. Small Python programs can run under Supervisor as child processes and monitor the lifecycle of other processes running under Supervisor. These can be used implement your own decisions about what to do when processes go down, or how to automatically deploy more processes when your web server traffic spikes.

With each feature we introduce, we’ll talk about the real-world needs that lead to their development and practical use cases that apply to many deployment scenarios.

Throughout the talk, we’ll have live demonstrations in addition to the slides that will show the more interesting features in action.

We’ll wrap up with what’s coming next for Supervisor, our online resources, how to get involved with other users in our community, and Q&A.