Setting up a Functional runit Service

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What is runit?

I came across runit a few years ago and I was really amazed how clean it was to set up a process and how effective this service supervision scheme was. It is based on a directory structure and once you get a hang of it, it is easy to set up services using the runit scheme.

According to the official documentation, “runit is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision, a replacement for sysvinit, and other init schemes”. This is what it means in layman terms:

• Automatic start of service after the system boots up
• Automatic restart and continuous monitoring of a service if it is terminated

Pre-requisites:

runit package: Make sure the package is installed on your system, by running the command.

dpkg -l | grep runit

If the output is empty, it implies that the package isn’t available and can be installed with the command below

apt-get install runit

Main Components of runit:

• runsv
• runsvdir
• sv

runsv: It starts and monitors the service (and optionally the log service associated with the service if…