Personal Monit
==============

After testing a number of combinations of service management tools, process
monitoring tools and daemonisation techniques I came to the conclusion that a
combination of monit, daemon, logrotate and cron is about as good as it gets:

 * monit to explicitly start and stop daemons.
 * daemon to correctly daemonise a "normal" process and write the log file to
   a central location.
 * daemon to mmediately respawn a process if it dies.
 * periodic monit to check process resource usage and response.
 * periodic monit to ensure daemon stays running.
 * logrotate to keep log files under control.

That little lot is not a lot of fun to set up so I wrote pmonit to take care
of the boring stuff.

Basic Use
=========

WARNING: pmonit currently overwrites files. It does not try to nicely update
any files that exist so if you've made changes then you need to handle that
yourself.

pmonit currenyl has two commands: init and service.

    Usage: pmonit [options] init|service

    Options:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      --home=HOME           home direcory
      --email=EMAIL         email address
      --smtp-server=SMTP_SERVER
                            SMTP server

The 'init' command initialises your home directory (by default) with a
cron+monit+logrotate shell that will manage services you add later.

    pmonit --email [email protected] init

'init' creates a simple etc and var directory structure and prints some crontab
entries to the console for you to add.

The 'service' adds the basic files for a new service:

    pmonit service myservice

For now, the service is a daemonised 'sleep 15'. Simply edit
~/etc/monit.d/myservice and change the 'start program' line to start your
process instead. Most of the time you'll only need to touch the bit after the
'--' daemon arg.