see also: - lib/ControlFreak/Tutorial.pod - lib/ControlFreak.pm (pod)

ControlFreak's intent is to help you really control your (web) app (in production and in development) and your resources effectively.

It's a process supervisor:

• It fixes the mess of pid file management
• It facilitates the roll-forward and backward of releases
• It optionally controls the resources that your app needs (essentially sockets) and make these resources available to your app using a push model
• ... and many other benefits like flexible logging/monitoring of everything

It supervises any type of services. Examples:

In Dev:

• memcached
• gearmand
• perlbal
• plack
• workers
• ddlockd

In Prod:

• gearman workers
• schwartz workers
• plack (web) workers)
• (or, apache if you prefer)

How does it work?

It is a pure Perl implementation consisting in:

• a controlling process: cfkd, which runs an AnyEvent loop usually running in the background
• a command line tool to talk to it: cfkctl
• a configuration file (just a bunch of commands really)

cfkd forks to start (exec) the services it controls.

Optimally, cfkd binds sockets and share them with workers before forking (known as pre-fork module), it can also make you benefit from Copy On Write effect (sharing memory between all your workers for instance).

At your command cfkd, restarts, stops, kills any service.