Execute and control OS processes from Erlang/OTP.
This project implements an Erlang application with a C++ port program that gives light-weight Erlang processes fine-grain control over execution of OS processes.
The following features are supported:
- Start/stop OS commands and get their OS process IDs, and termination reason (exit code, signal number, core dump status).
- Manage/monitor externally started OS processes.
- Execute OS processes synchronously and asynchronously.
- Set OS command's working directory, environment, process group, effective user, process priority.
- Provide custom termination command for killing a process or relying on default SIGTERM/SIGKILL behavior.
- Specify custom timeout for SIGKILL after the termination command or SIGTERM was executed and the running OS child process is still alive.
- Link an Erlang processes to OS processes (via intermediate Erlang Pids that are linked to an associated OS process).
- Monitor termination of OS processes.
- Terminate all processes beloging to an OS process group.
- Kill processes belonging to an OS process group at process exit.
- Communicate with an OS process via its STDIN.
- Redirect STDOUT and STDERR of an OS process to a file, erlang process, or a custom function. When redirected to a file, the file can be open in append/truncate mode, and given creation access mask.
- Run interactive processes with psudo-terminal pty support.
- Execute OS processes under different user credentials (using Linux capabilities).
- Perform proper cleanup of OS child processes at port program termination time.
This application provides significantly better control
over OS processes than built-in erlang:open_port/2 command with a
{spawn, Command} option, and performs proper OS child process cleanup
when the emulator exits.
See http://saleyn.github.com/erlexec for more information.
Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOS X
See http://saleyn.github.io/erlexec
Make sure you have rebar (http://github.com/basho/rebar or http://github.com/basho/rebar3) installed locally and the rebar script is in the path.
If you are deploying the application on Linux and would like to take advantage of exec-port running tasks using effective user IDs different from the real user ID that started exec-port, then make sure that libcap-dev[el] library is installed.
OS-specific libcap-dev installation instructions:
- Fedora, CentOS: "yum install libcap-devel"
- Ubuntu: "apt-get install libcap-dev"
$ git clone git@github.com:saleyn/erlexec.git
$ make
# NOTE: for enabling optimized build of exec-port, do the following instead:
$ OPTIMIZE=true make
The program is distributed under BSD license. Copyright (c) 2003 Serge Aleynikov