Using God to monitor Unicorn - Start exited with non-zero code = 1

Question

I am working on a God script to monitor my Unicorns. I started with GitHub's examples script and have been modifying it to match my server configuration. Once God is running, commands such as god stop unicorn and god restart unicorn work just fine.

However, god start unicorn results in WARN: unicorn start command exited with non-zero code = 1. The weird part is that if I copy the start script directly from the config file, it starts right up like a brand new mustang.

This is my start command:

/usr/local/bin/unicorn_rails -c /home/my-linux-user/my-rails-app/config/unicorn.rb -E production -D 

I have declared all paths as absolute in the config file. Any ideas what might be preventing this script from working?

Answer 1

I haven't used unicorn as an app server, but I've used god for monitoring before.

If I remember rightly when you start god and give your config file, it automatically starts whatever you've told it to watch. Unicorn is probably already running, which is why it's throwing the error.

Check this by running god status once you've started god. If that's not the case you can check on the command line what the comand's exit status is:

/usr/local/bin/unicorn_rails -c /home/my-linux-user/my-rails-app/config/unicorn.rb -E production -D; echo $?;

that echo will print the exit status of the last command. If it's zero, the last command reported no errors. Try starting unicorn twice in a row, I expect the second time it'll return 1, because it's already running.

EDIT:

including the actual solution from comments, as this seems to be a popular response:

You can set an explicit user and group if your process requires to be run as a specific user.

God.watch do |w|   w.uid = 'root'   w.gid = 'root'    # remainder of config end