Duplicate Work with Tini Init

[andrewhowdencom]

Hi All,

I love this solution. However, there is parallel work that appears at first glance to be similar at https://github.com/krallin/tini. Is there some notable difference between the two that I can't discern?

Cheers,

[chriskuehl]

@andrewhowdencom thanks for the question!

tini is quite similar to dumb-init, especially for use in Docker containers. The defaults are a little different (dumb-init by default creates a session rooted at the child and proxies signals to the process group started there, and I think tini by default proxies signals only to the immediate child), but I believe tini supports a similar mode as well (and dumb-init also supports the single-child mode).

I think for use in Docker you will find them pretty much equivalent.

At Yelp we use dumb-init extensively in our Docker containers (in basically all of the hundreds of images we have), but we've also started using it some surprising cases. For example, in our system for running development environments (which involves launching lots of services at once, similar to docker-compose but without requiring each service to be in Docker), we have a lot of "services" that involve launching 3-4 processes, and it's difficult to make sure they all get killed. Using dumb-init puts dumb-init at the "root" of the service, with the 3-4 processes below it, and means you can just signal dumb-init in order to kill all the various processes.

Here's a concrete example of a really unexpected use-case. I don't really know how tini compares for use outside of Docker, or whether that's even a concern for you.

I can say that we do use dumb-init very extensively and I can't imagine us not continuing to support it in the foreseeable future.

(disclaimer: I haven't significantly tested or reviewed tini myself, but it certainly seems solid from looking at the code)

[chriskuehl]

(closing this for now, but feel free to reopen or ask other questions!)

[andrewhowdencom]

Thanks for this amazing response!