Checking if daemons have been restarted

TL;DR: Use this script.

I’ve been working on an ansible script to set up web hosting (because cheap VPSes are cheaper than cheap shared hosting for the features I want) and, since I don’t like having to put in effort for maintenance and debugging, I’ve been trying to make it as robust as possible.

As part of that, I wrote a little python helper script (tested under 2.7 and 3.3) which checks that all processes matching a given name were started after the modification date of a given config file. (In other words, it checks if the config changes have been applied)

I just thought I’d share it in case anyone else finds it useful. Unlike many other approaches I’ve seen for looking up when a process was started, it doesn’t read the system time twice to convert from “seconds since boot” to “seconds since the epoch”, so it should give perfectly deterministic results.

CC BY-SA 4.0 Checking if daemons have been restarted by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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