Ruby daemons vs daemon-kit gems: what are the pros and cons?

Question

What are the relative pros and cons of:

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/daemons
• http://github.com/kennethkalmer/daemon-kit

Which is more robust?

Are there any other effective Ruby daemon management tools?

Answer 1

DISCLAIMER: I maintain daemon-kit, so this might appear bias but I'm trying my best to be honest.

daemon-kit grew as a set of wrappers around the daemons gem, then about a year ago (with 0.1.7.3) I ripped all traces of the daemons gem from the project and handled everything myself, which resolved the issues you mentioned above, as well as several other.

Instead of acclaiming my own project (not that it needs it), I'll highlight some shortcomings that I plan to address in the future:

• Daemons are not easily embedded into Rails applications
• Project layout enforced on developers might be to rigid
• Biased towards capistrano-based deployments of daemons
• Testing daemons is difficult, but on inconceivable

I've got a separate branch where I'm toying with a total rewrite that hopes to make the project more flexible, but it is by no means a pain at the moment. It is currently in production use at quite a few companies, from ISP infrastructure management to telecoms, twitter polling & processing, and just about everything in between.

Movement on the project has been slow in the last few months, purely because it works well. The low version number is very deceptive, it should in fact be way past a 1.x release by now...

Hope this helps!