Install and Configure Supervisor on Ubuntu 16.04

The following will explain how to install and configure supervisor on Ubuntu
if you have a long running service that you want to activate on linux, say an apache web server, a jupyter notebook service,etc.. then you would want to have that service run and monitored by supervisor

Supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.
It shares some of the same goals of programs like launchd, daemontools, and runit. Unlike some of these programs, it is not meant to be run as a substitute for init as “process id 1”. Instead it is meant to be used to control processes related to a project or a customer, and is meant to start like any other program at boot time.

Installing Supervisor

to install supervisor, simply put this command

sudo apt-get install supervisor

Running Supervisor

To run, stop, and check supervisor status, use this command

sudo service supervisor start
sudo service supervisor stop
sudo service supervisor status

Adding a program to Supervisor

All program that you want to run on Supervisor will need to be added to configuration, Supervisor has all the configuration on /etc/supervisor/conf.d. To add a program simply create a new .conf configuration file

Move to /etc/supervisor/conf.d folder

cd /etc/supervisor/conf.d

start to write and create new file

nano sample.conf

and then follow this pattern for supervisor configuration

[program:sample]
command=/usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/jupyterhub --port 9060 --ip 192.168.0.1
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stderr_logfile=/var/log/jupyterhub.err.log
stdout_logfile=/var/log/jupyterhub.out.log

This configuration file will simply do the following

• register a new process called "sample" which runs command to activate jupyterhub
• set the process to autostart and autorestart (the default is false)
• and set the stderr_logfile and stdout_logfile location, this will put everything that shows on screen to a file when you run the command directly in console

make sure supervisor service already started, then load configuration by the following

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update

and then you can check the result by using

sudo supervisorctl status