Writing init scripts can be a pain and running your apps in tmux or screen sessions, while easier, seems unprofessional. That's where supervisord comes in. Supervisord provides an easy way to define and manage processes. It seems to be more well known in the python world, but it can be used to run any command on your system path.

Installing supervisord is easy. You can run apt-get install supervisor or yum install supervisor if you're on debian/redhat. If your distribution doesn't offer supervisor in it's packcage manager, you can install it via pip install supervisor. More info about installation can be found here.

To have supervisord manage a ring app, place the following in /etc/supervisor/conf.d. Be sure to change out the program name, paths, and user.

[program:blog-checker]
command= /usr/local/bin/java -jar target/blog-checker-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar
directory=/usr/local/www/blog-checker
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startretries=3
user=www

The above configuration executes /usr/local/bin/java -jar target/blog-checker-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar as the user www in the /usr/local/www/blog-checker directory. Lines 4-6 set this app to be run at startup and to autorestart if it fails.

To start the app, run supervisorctl reread && supervisorctl update && supervisorctl start <your_app_name_here>.

You can also run supervisorctl status to check the status of your app or supervisorctl restart <your_app_name_here> to restart it.