daemon_controller: Automatic Daemon Process Management

After tackling the difficult task of improving Rails deployment, Phusion - the creators of Passenger (mod_rails) recently announced the availability of daemon_controller - a library (rather than a stand-alone tool) for managing daemons. It lets you write applications that manage daemons in a robust manner (e.g. mongrel_cluster or UltraSphinx could be adapted to use this library).

The primary motivation for using daemon_controller is to make it easier to have other applications (such as Rails apps) start daemons without encountering race conditions or parallel attempts.…