[php] Run php script as daemon process

I need to run a php script as daemon process (wait for instructions and do stuff). cron job will not do it for me because actions need to be taken as soon as instruction arrives. I know PHP is not really the best option for daemon processes due to memory management issues, but due to various reasons I have to use PHP in this case. I came across a tool by libslack called Daemon (http://libslack.org/daemon) it seems to help me manage daemon processes, but there hasn't been any updates in the last 5 years, so I wonder if you know some other alternatives suitable for my case. Any information will be really appreciated.

If you can - grab a copy of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. The entire chapter 13 is devoted to daemon programming. Examples are in C, but all the function you need have wrappers in PHP (basically the pcntl and posix extensions).

In a few words - writing a daemon (this is posible only on *nix based OS-es - Windows uses services) is like this:

1. Call umask(0) to prevent permission issues.
2. fork() and have the parent exit.
3. Call setsid().
4. Setup signal processing of SIGHUP (usually this is ignored or used to signal the daemon to reload its configuration) and SIGTERM (to tell the process to exit gracefully).
5. fork() again and have the parent exit.
6. Change the current working dir with chdir().
7. fclose() stdin, stdout and stderr and don't write to them. The corrrect way is to redirect those to either /dev/null or a file, but I couldn't find a way to do it in PHP. It is possible when you launch the daemon to redirect them using the shell (you'll have to find out yourself how to do that, I don't know :).
8. Do your work!

Also, since you are using PHP, be careful for cyclic references, since the PHP garbage collector, prior to PHP 5.3, has no way of collecting those references and the process will memory leak, until it eventually crashes.

As others have already mentioned, running PHP as a daemon is quite easy, and can be done using a single line of command. But the actual problem is keeping it running and managing it. I've had the same problem quite some time ago and although there are plenty of solutions already available, most of them have lots of dependencies or are difficult to use and not suitable for basic usages. I wrote a shell script that can manage a any process/application including PHP cli scripts. It can be set as a cronjob to start the application and will contain the application and manage it. If it's executed again, for example via the same cronjob, it check if the app is running or not, if it does then simply exits and let its previous instance continue managing the application.

I uploaded it to github, feel free to use it : https://github.com/sinasalek/EasyDeamonizer

EasyDeamonizer

Simply watches over your application (start, restart, log, monitor, etc). a generic script to make sure that your appliation remains running properly. Intentionally it uses process name instread of pid/lock file to prevent all its side effects and keep the script as simple and as stirghforward as possible, so it always works even when EasyDaemonizer itself is restarted. Features

• Starts the application and optionally a customized delay for each start
• Makes sure that only one instance is running
• Monitors CPU usage and restarts the app automatically when it reaches the defined threshold
• Setting EasyDeamonizer to run via cron to run it again if it's halted for any reason
• Logs its activity

you can check pm2 here is, http://pm2.keymetrics.io/

create a ssh file, such as worker.sh put into your php script that you will deal with.

worker.sh

php /path/myscript.php

daemon start

pm2 start worker.sh

Cheers, that is it.

Extending Emil Ivaov answer, You can do the following to close STDIN, STDOUT AND STDERROR in php

if (!fclose(STDIN)) {
    exit("Could not close STDIN");
}

if (!fclose(STDOUT)) {
    exit("Could not close STDOUT");
}

if (!fclose(STDERR)) {
    exit("Could not close STDERR");
}

$STDIN = fopen('/dev/null', 'r');
$STDOUT = fopen('/dev/null', 'w');
$STDERR = fopen('/var/log/our_error.log', 'wb');

Basically you close the standard streams so that PHP has no place to write. The following fopen calls will set the standard IO to /dev/null.

I have read this from book of Rob Aley - PHP beyond the web

There is more than one way to solve this problem.

I do not know the specifics but perhaps there is another way to trigger the PHP process. For instance if you need the code to run based on events in a SQL database you could setup a trigger to execute your script. This is really easy to do under PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/external-pl.html .

Honestly I think your best bet is to create a Damon process using nohup. nohup allows the command to continue to execute even after the user has logged out:

nohup php myscript.php &

There is however a very serious problem. As you said PHP's memory manager is complete garbage, it was built with the assumption that a script is only executing for a few seconds and then exists. Your PHP script will start to use GIGABYTES of memory after only a few days. You MUST ALSO create a cron script that runs every 12 or maybe 24 hours that kills and re-spawns your php script like this:

killall -3 php
nohup php myscript.php &

But what if the script was in the middle of a job? Well kill -3 is an interrupt, its the same as doing a ctrl+c on the CLI. Your php script can catch this interrupt and exit gracefully using the PHP pcntl library: http://php.oregonstate.edu/manual/en/function.pcntl-signal.php

Here is an example:

function clean_up() {
  GLOBAL $lock;
  mysql_close();
  fclose($lock)
  exit();
}
pcntl_signal(SIGINT, 'clean_up');

The idea behind the $lock is that the PHP script can open a file with a fopen("file","w");. Only one process can have a write lock on a file, so using this you can make sure that only one copy of your PHP script is running.

Good Luck!

I wrote and deployed a simple php-daemon, code is online here

https://github.com/jmullee/PhpUnixDaemon

Features: privilege dropping, signal handling, logging

I used it in a queue-handler (use case: trigger a lengthy operation from a web page, without making the page-generating php wait, i.e. launch an asynchronous operation) https://github.com/jmullee/PhpIPCMessageQueue

You can

1. Use nohup as Henrik suggested.
2. Use screen and run your PHP program as a regular process inside that. This gives you more control than using nohup.
3. Use a daemoniser like http://supervisord.org/ (it's written in Python but can daemonise any command line program and give you a remote control to manage it).
4. Write your own daemonise wrapper like Emil suggested but it's overkill IMO.

I'd recommend the simplest method (screen in my opinion) and then if you want more features or functionality, move to more complex methods.

Kevin van Zonneveld wrote a very nice detailed article on this, in his example he makes use of the System_Daemon PEAR package (last release date on 2009-09-02).

Check out https://github.com/shaneharter/PHP-Daemon

This is an object-oriented daemon library. It has built-in support for things like logging and error recovery, and it has support for creating background workers.

I was looking for a simple solution without having to install additional stuff and compatible with common hostings that allow SSH access.

I've ended up with this setup for my chat server:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 crazypoems psacln   309 ene 30 14:01 checkChatServerRunning.sh
-rw-r--r--  1 crazypoems psacln  3018 ene 30 13:12 class.chathandler.php
-rw-r--r--  1 crazypoems psacln    29 ene 30 14:05 cron.log
-rw-r--r--  1 crazypoems psacln  2560 ene 29 08:04 index.php
-rw-r--r--  1 crazypoems psacln  2672 ene 30 13:29 php-socket.php
-rwxr-xr-x  1 crazypoems psacln   310 ene 30 14:04 restartChatServer.sh
-rwxr-xr-x  1 crazypoems psacln   122 ene 30 13:28 startChatServer.sh
-rwxr-xr-x  1 crazypoems psacln   224 ene 30 13:56 stopChatServer.sh

And the scripts:

startChatServer.sh

#!/bin/bash
nohup /opt/plesk/php/5.6/bin/php -q /var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/php-socket.php > /dev/null &

stopChatServer.sh

#!/bin/bash
PID=`ps -eaf | grep '/var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/php-socket.php' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
if [[ "" !=  "$PID" ]]; then
  echo "killing $PID"
  kill -9 $PID
else
  echo "not running"
fi

restartChatServer.sh

#!/bin/bash
PID=`ps -eaf | grep '/var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/php-socket.php' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
if [[ "" !=  "$PID" ]]; then
  echo "killing $PID"
  kill -9 $PID
else
  echo "not running"
fi
echo "Starting again"
/var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/startChatServer.sh

And last but not least, I have put this last script on a cron job, to check if the "chat server is running", and if not, to start it:

Cron job every minute

-bash-4.1$ crontab -l
*       *       *       *       * /var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/checkChatServerRunning.sh > /var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/cron.log

checkChatServerRunning.sh

#!/bin/bash
PID=`ps -eaf | grep '/var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/php-socket.php' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
if [[ "" !=  "$PID" ]]; then
  echo "Chat server running on $PID"
else
  echo "Not running, going to start it"
  /var/www/vhosts/crazypoems.org/httpdocs/chat/startChatServer.sh
fi

So with this setup:

• I manually can control the service with the scripts when needed (eg: maintenance)
• The cron job will start the server on reboot, or on crash

With new systemd you can create a service.

You must create a file or a symlink in /etc/systemd/system/, eg. myphpdaemon.service and place content like this one, myphpdaemon will be the name of the service:

[Unit]
Description=My PHP Daemon Service
#May your script needs MySQL or other services to run, eg. MySQL Memcached
Requires=mysqld.service memcached.service 
After=mysqld.service memcached.service

[Service]
User=root
Type=simple
TimeoutSec=0
PIDFile=/var/run/myphpdaemon.pid
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php -f /srv/www/myphpdaemon.php arg1 arg2> /dev/null 2>/dev/null
#ExecStop=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID #It's the default you can change whats happens on stop command
#ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
KillMode=process

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=42s

StandardOutput=null #If you don't want to make toms of logs you can set it null if you sent a file or some other options it will send all php output to this one.
StandardError=/var/log/myphpdaemon.log
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

You will be able to start, get status, restart and stop the services using the command

systemctl <start|status|restart|stop|enable> myphpdaemon

The PHP script should have a kind of "loop" to continue running.

<?php
gc_enable();//
while (!connection_aborted() || PHP_SAPI == "cli") {

  //Code Logic

  //sleep and usleep could be useful
    if (PHP_SAPI == "cli") {
        if (rand(5, 100) % 5 == 0) {
            gc_collect_cycles(); //Forces collection of any existing garbage cycles
        }
    }
}

Working example:

[Unit]
Description=PHP APP Sync Service
Requires=mysqld.service memcached.service
After=mysqld.service memcached.service

[Service]
User=root
Type=simple
TimeoutSec=0
PIDFile=/var/run/php_app_sync.pid
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/php -f /var/www/app/private/server/cron/app_sync.php  2>&1 > /var/log/app_sync.log'
KillMode=mixed

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=42s

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

If your PHP routine should be executed once in a cycle (like a diggest) you may should use a shell or bash script to be invoked into systemd service file instead of PHP directly, for example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
script_path="/app/services/"

while [ : ]
do
#    clear
    php -f "$script_path"${1}".php" fixedparameter ${2}  > /dev/null 2>/dev/null
    sleep 1
done

If you chose these option you should change the KillMode to mixed to processes, bash(main) and PHP(child) be killed.

ExecStart=/app/phpservice/runner.sh phpfile parameter  > /dev/null 2>/dev/null
KillMode=process

This method also is effective if you're facing a memory leak.

Note: Every time that you change your "myphpdaemon.service" you must run `systemctl daemon-reload', but do worry if you not do, it will be alerted when is needed.

Another option is to use Upstart. It was originally developed for Ubuntu (and comes packaged with it by default), but is intended to be suitable for all Linux distros.

This approach is similar to Supervisord and daemontools, in that it automatically starts the daemon on system boot and respawns on script completion.

How to set it up:

Create a new script file at /etc/init/myphpworker.conf. Here is an example:

# Info
description "My PHP Worker"
author      "Jonathan"

# Events
start on startup
stop on shutdown

# Automatically respawn
respawn
respawn limit 20 5

# Run the script!
# Note, in this example, if your PHP script returns
# the string "ERROR", the daemon will stop itself.
script
    [ $(exec /usr/bin/php -f /path/to/your/script.php) = 'ERROR' ] && ( stop; exit 1; )
end script

Starting & stopping your daemon:

sudo service myphpworker start
sudo service myphpworker stop

Check if your daemon is running:

sudo service myphpworker status

Thanks

A big thanks to Kevin van Zonneveld, where I learned this technique from.

I recently had a need for a cross-platform solution (Windows, Mac, and Linux) to the problem of running PHP scripts as daemons. I solved the problem by writing my own C++ based solution and making binaries:

https://github.com/cubiclesoft/service-manager/

Full support for Linux (via sysvinit), but also Windows NT services and Mac OSX launchd.

If you just need Linux, then a couple of the other solutions presented here work well enough and, depending on the flavor. There is also Upstart and systemd these days, which have fallbacks to sysvinit scripts. But half of the point of using PHP is that it is cross-platform in nature, so code written in the language has a pretty good chance of working everywhere as-is. Deficiencies start showing up when certain external native OS-level aspects enter the picture such as system services, but you'll get that problem with most scripting languages.

Attempting to catch signals as someone here suggested in PHP userland is not a good idea. Read the documentation on pcntl_signal() carefully and you will quickly learn that PHP handles signals using some rather unpleasant methods (specifically, 'ticks') that chew up a bunch of cycles for something rarely seen by processes (i.e. signals). Signal handling in PHP is also only barely available on POSIX platforms and support differs based on the version of PHP. It initially sounds like a decent solution but it falls pretty short of being truly useful.

PHP has also been getting better about memory leak issues as time progresses. You still have to be careful (the DOM XML parser tends to leak still) but I rarely see runaway processes these days and the PHP bug tracker is pretty quiet by comparison to the days of yore.

I run a large number of PHP daemons.

I agree with you that PHP is not the best (or even a good) language for doing this, but the daemons share code with the web-facing components so overall it is a good solution for us.

We use daemontools for this. It is smart, clean and reliable. In fact we use it for running all of our daemons.

You can check this out at http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html.

EDIT: A quick list of features.

• Automatically starts the daemon on reboot
• Automatically restart dameon on failure
• Logging is handled for you, including rollover and pruning
• Management interface: 'svc' and 'svstat'
• UNIX friendly (not a plus for everyone perhaps)