Home / server / Questions / 193059
Accepted
Chris McCauley
Asked: 2010-10-21 09:41:41 +0800 CST

Can upstart handle symbolic links to config files?

  • 772

I have all of my upstart config files under version control. My ideal way to use upstart is to create soft links from my version control repository (mercurial - not that it matters) into /etc/init but upstart fails to see the jobs. Everything is fine if I copy the files from the repository directory to /etc/init.

Anyone know why upstart fails to handle symbolic or even hard links?

Thanks

Chris

upstart ubuntu-10.04

3 Answers

  1. Upstart watches its configuration directories with inotify and reloads the configuration when any of the files change or a new file is added. Apparently this doesn't work for symlinks.

    To manually update the configuration use

    $ initctl reload-configuration
    • 49
  2. Best Answer

    Upstart does not support symlinks because they might point to a file on a partition that is not loaded at boot time.

    I have gotten around this in my own project by putting the conf files in /etc/init/myscripts and then binding that to a directory in my repository. mount --bind /etc/init/myscripts ~/code/repo/initscripts.

    Add this to /etc/fstab and the binding will be persistent:

    /etc/init/myscripts  /home/me/code/repo/initscripts      none    bind

    This effectively gives you hard-linked directories. Upstart will treat the conf files as any other, because they are local to /etc/init. Your DVCS will also see them as local files in the repo, so it will also treat them as it would any other files stored there. Best of both worlds.

    • 9

  3. As mentioned before:

    initctl reload-configuration

    However if you get an error like the following:

    initctl: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.155" (uid=1000 pid=6177 comm="initctl reload-configuration ") interface="com.ubuntu.Upstart0_6" member="ReloadConfiguration" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="com.ubuntu.Upstart" (uid=0 pid=1 comm="/sbin/init")

    You must invoke the sudo:

    sudo initctl reload-configuration
    • 1