This blog post would have been more appropriately titled, “I need supervisord,” but I decided instead to go with a more click baity title instead. Hope you forgive me. Okay… so what’s all this supervisord business about, and why do you and I need it?

I just launched my latest side project, MoneyPhone, a personal finance web-app powered by Flask into production on a live virtual server the other day and have been struggling with the fact that every morning when I wake up the app has quit working! The fix is pretty simple however, I just restart my Ubuntu virtual server and everything starts working again. However, I don’t want to have to keep doing this every morning, and neither do you! So it looks like you and I need supervisord in our lives.

For the past two days I’ve been searching for answers regarding this bug in my free time, and the name supervisord seems to keep popping up so I’m going to assume that this is probably what I’m looking for. And this morning I happened to stumble upon a pretty interesting article regarding Steve Huffman, co-founder and developer of Reddit, once had the exact same problem after launching Reddit. The author of the aforementioned post writes:

Waiting around to restart your web server is painful – Steve Huffman, one of the founders of Reddit talks about literally sleeping with his laptop next to his bed and constantly waking to restart a process at ungodly hours of the morning… Eventually he discovered supervisord and got some sleep.

UPDATE (5/1/2019): I actually did not end up needing supervisord or any related software to fix my woes. In the end, I just needed to beef up my $5 per month virtual server from DigitalOcean to a $40 per month vps… whoops! So I suppose a more appropriate title for this blog post would have been: You don’t need supervisord, but you probably need more computing power. Since beefing up the server, the app hasn’t crashed once.