Automatically restarting Erlang applications
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by Nick
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Published on 2010-06-16T15:18:45Z
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I recently ran into a bug where an entire Erlang application died, yielding a log message that looked like this:
=INFO REPORT==== 11-Jun-2010::11:07:25 ===
application: myapp
exited: shutdown
type: temporary
I have no idea what triggered this shutdown, but the real problem I have is that it didn't restart itself. Instead, the now-empty Erlang VM just sat there doing nothing.
Now, from the research I've done, it looks like there are other "start types" you can give an application: 'transient' and 'permanent'.
If I start a Supervisor within an application, I can tell it to make a particular process transient or permanent, and it will automatically restart it for me. However, according to the documentation, if I make an application transient or permanent, it doesn't restart it when it dies, but rather it kills all the other applications as well.
What I really want to do is somehow tell the Erlang VM that a particular application should always be running, and if it goes down, restart it. Is this possible to do?
(I'm not talking about implementing a supervisor on top of my application, because then it's a catch 22: what if my supervisor process crashes? I'm looking for some sort of API or setting that I can use to have Erlang monitor and restart my application for me.)
Thanks!
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