At first glance, this looks like the process watchdog I've been waiting for. Very neat approach to configuration, smart defaults etc. I especially like the idea of automatically redirecting stdout and stderr to out and err files in the working directory.

Thanks. I've been looking for something like this for a long time, and I've implemented around 3 different solutions for doing this (pure bash, python, c) but none has been as instantly useful as this.

I wanted something like DJBs daemontools but with less configuration and setup. And I've seen nohup, daemonize etc. But these loose ownership of the running process, and you eventually have to do hacks if you want to do stuff like auto restart or signal degradation.

What benefits does this have over daemontools? http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

Setting up a service with gabriel is as simple as:

    gabriel --cwd /var/run/service -- /bin/service

Killing the service:

    gabriel --cwd /var/run/service --kill

The main difference between this and daemontools is that this is more ad-hoc and in place. If cwd isn't specified, the current directory will be used to setup the necessary set of files to start/stop/restart a persistent service.

It's also possible to specify a kill pattern which governs how the process should be forced to shutdown (similar to start-stop-daemon in gentoo):

    gabriel --cwd /var/run/service --kill-pattern TERM:10:KILL:10 -- /bin/service

Send TERM, wait 10 seconds, send KILL, wait 10 seconds. Shutdown no matter what.

So Gabriel does not require and explicit structure, much is left to be handled by sensible defaults.

What's in a name?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel

Interesting, but you may want to pick a different font for you text; I can barely read it.