childprocess

This gem aims at being a simple and reliable solution for controlling external programs running in the background on any Ruby / OS combination.

The code originated in the selenium-webdriver gem, but should prove useful as a standalone library.

Requirements

• Ruby 2.4+, JRuby 9+

Windows users must ensure the ffi gem (>= 1.0.11) is installed in order to use ChildProcess.

Usage

The object returned from ChildProcess.build will implement ChildProcess::AbstractProcess.

Basic examples

process = ChildProcess.build("ruby", "-e", "sleep")

# inherit stdout/stderr from parent...
process.io.inherit!

# ...or pass an IO
process.io.stdout = Tempfile.new("child-output")

# modify the environment for the child
process.environment["a"] = "b"
process.environment["c"] = nil

# set the child's working directory
process.cwd = '/some/path'

# start the process
process.start

# check process status
process.alive?    #=> true
process.exited?   #=> false

# wait indefinitely for process to exit...
process.wait
process.exited?   #=> true

# get the exit code
process.exit_code #=> 0

# ...or poll for exit + force quit
begin
  process.poll_for_exit(10)
rescue ChildProcess::TimeoutError
  process.stop # tries increasingly harsher methods to kill the process.
end

Advanced examples

Output to pipe

r, w = IO.pipe

begin
  process = ChildProcess.build("sh" , "-c",
                               "for i in {1..3}; do echo $i; sleep 1; done")
  process.io.stdout = w
  process.start # This results in a fork, inheriting the write end of the pipe.

  # Close parent's copy of the write end of the pipe so when the (forked) child
  # process closes its write end of the pipe the parent receives EOF when
  # attempting to read from it. If the parent leaves its write end open, it
  # will not detect EOF.
  w.close

  thread = Thread.new do
    begin
      loop do
        print r.readpartial(16384)
      end
    rescue EOFError
      # Child has closed the write end of the pipe
    end
  end

  process.wait
  thread.join
ensure
  r.close
end

Note that if you just want to get the output of a command, the backtick method on Kernel may be a better fit.

Write to stdin

process = ChildProcess.build("cat")

out      = Tempfile.new("duplex")
out.sync = true

process.io.stdout = process.io.stderr = out
process.duplex    = true # sets up pipe so process.io.stdin will be available after .start

process.start
process.io.stdin.puts "hello world"
process.io.stdin.close

process.poll_for_exit(exit_timeout_in_seconds)

out.rewind
out.read #=> "hello world\n"

Pipe output to another ChildProcess

search           = ChildProcess.build("grep", '-E', %w(redis memcached).join('|'))
search.duplex    = true # sets up pipe so search.io.stdin will be available after .start
search.io.stdout = $stdout
search.start

listing           = ChildProcess.build("ps", "aux")
listing.io.stdout = search.io.stdin
listing.start
listing.wait

search.io.stdin.close
search.wait

Prefer posix_spawn on *nix

If the parent process is using a lot of memory, fork+exec can be very expensive. The posix_spawn() API removes this overhead.

ChildProcess.posix_spawn = true
process = ChildProcess.build(*args)

To be able to use this, please make sure that you have the ffi gem installed.

Ensure entire process tree dies

By default, the child process does not create a new process group. This means there's no guarantee that the entire process tree will die when the child process is killed. To solve this:

process = ChildProcess.build(*args)
process.leader = true
process.start

Detach from parent

process = ChildProcess.build("sleep", "10")
process.detach = true
process.start

Invoking a shell

As opposed to Kernel#system, Kernel#exec et al., ChildProcess will not automatically execute your command in a shell (like /bin/sh or cmd.exe) depending on the arguments. This means that if you try to execute e.g. gem executables (like bundle or gem) or Windows executables (with .com or .bat extensions) you may see a ChildProcess::LaunchError. You can work around this by being explicit about what interpreter to invoke:

ChildProcess.build("cmd.exe", "/c", "bundle")
ChildProcess.build("ruby", "-S", "bundle")

Log to file

Errors and debugging information are logged to $stderr by default but a custom logger can be used instead.

logger = Logger.new('logfile.log')
logger.level = Logger::DEBUG
ChildProcess.logger = logger

Caveats

• With JRuby on Unix, modifying ENV["PATH"] before using childprocess could lead to 'Command not found' errors, since JRuby is unable to modify the environment used for PATH searches in java.lang.ProcessBuilder. This can be avoided by setting ChildProcess.posix_spawn = true.
• With JRuby on Java >= 9, the JVM may need to be configured to allow JRuby to access neccessary implementations; this can be done by adding --add-opens java.base/java.io=org.jruby.dist and --add-opens java.base/sun.nio.ch=org.jruby.dist to the JAVA_OPTS environment variable that is used by JRuby when launching the JVM.

Implementation

How the process is launched and killed depends on the platform:

• Unix : fork + exec (or posix_spawn if enabled)
• Windows : CreateProcess() and friends
• JRuby : java.lang.{Process,ProcessBuilder}

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (off of the development branch) git checkout -b my-new-feature dev
3. Commit your changes git commit -am 'Add some feature'
4. Push to the branch git push origin my-new-feature
5. Create new Pull Request

Publishing a New Release

When publishing a new gem release:

1. Ensure latest build is green on the dev branch
2. Ensure CHANGELOG is updated
3. Ensure version is bumped following Semantic Versioning
4. Merge the dev branch into master: git checkout master && git merge dev
5. Ensure latest build is green on the master branch
6. Build gem from the green master branch: git checkout master && gem build childprocess.gemspec
7. Push gem to RubyGems: gem push childprocess-<VERSION>.gem
8. Tag commit with version, annotated with release notes: git tag -a <VERSION>

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010-2015 Jari Bakken. See LICENSE for details.