gflag --pidfile isn't working

[Christian Berendt]

We're starting the all nova processes like nova-compute --pidfile=/var/run/nova/compute.pid. The directory /var/run/nova exists and is world writable and world readable (777). After starting all processes (nova-compute, ...) there are no pidfiles in /var/run/nova/.

  --pidfile: pidfile to use for this service

32459 pts/6 S 0:03 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/nova-compute --flagfile=/etc/nova/nova.conf --pidfile=/var/run/nova/compute.pid

drwxrwxrwx 2 nova root 4096 Feb 3 14:26 nova

[Jay Pipes (jaypipes)]

--pidfile is no longer a supported flag in Bexar Nova. Ever since paste.deploy was introduced, although FLAGS.pidfile exists, it doesn't do anything anymore for the bin/* programs.

Two bugs are evident:

* FLAGS.pidfile should be removed. It is obselete and confusing for users who see it on the --help output
* No documentation exists for using the configuration file examples in etc/ (for instance, the etc/nova-api.conf file).

You can control the pidfile used in startup by using paster. Since Nova is now using paste.deploy, you can refer to this documentation on starting/stopping/reloading server daemons with paste.script:

http://pythonpaste.org/script/

Cheers,
jay

[Jay Pipes (jaypipes)]

Hmm, scratch that note about using paster...seems there may be performance issues with it.

I'm working with Chuck Thier on the Swift project to get some sort of best practice for this...please hold on.

[Christian Berendt (berendt)]

Linked branch removing the flag --pidfile. At the moment it's still used in some scripts in contrib/puppet/. Because I'm not using puppet at the moment I don't removed them there...