daemon off in production

[Igor Sysoev]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 07:40:19AM +0300, Yaniv Aknin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The documentations says I should never run nginx with the daemon off setting
> in production. I would like to do so anyway so my Python/twisted based
> process manager will have an easier time knowing if nginx terminated or not
> (I know there are other ways to do it, but this seems like the easiest; if
> I'll be forced to, I'll use another way).
> 
> I'm aware of SIGWINCH and nginx in general and especially after version
> 1.1.1, and I don't mind taking care of guaranteeing nginx will run without a
> controlling terminal (I will fork()/setsid() before exec()ing it), run in a
> sensible current working directory, etc. I just don't want it to do the
> daemonizing double fork.
> 
> From skimming the code, it appears to me that nothing bad should happen.
> What am I missing? Why is it so bad to run nginx in the foreground in
> production?

There are two directives: "master_process on|off" and "daemon on|off".
Both are used to simplify nginx development: while testing a bug/feature
I usually run nginx in foreground without master process and simply
press ^C to stop nginx. This is an analog of Apache's -X command line switch.
I did not want to type it in commanf line, so these two directives
have been introduced.

There was thought to allow nginx to run in single process mode in production
as many lightweight server do. So there is some incomplete code to support
this fucntionality. But this code is incomplete, so you should never
use "master_process off" in production.

As to "daemon off", I did not intend to use it in production (and never did),
but many people do it. I believe it is safe to use "daemon off" in
prodcution. You can apply SIGWINCH fix using:

http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/changeset/4020/nginx


-- 
Igor Sysoev