I’ve been using Stuart Sierra’s reloaded pattern on a few Clojure projects recently, and I hit upon the problem of how best to use Stuart Sierra’s reloaded with a typical long running application. So, I thought I’d share one possible solution.
Most of the code should be self explanatory, but there are a few things worth calling out. Starting (logically) from the end, I wanted to be able to run the process under a process manager like upstart, and from the terminal, and have the process shut-down when it gets sent SIGTERM or SIGINT (ie: from upstart or from Ctrl-C in the terminal). We use a runtime-shut-down hook, by registering an (un-started) Thread to be invoked with the JVM, which will be invoked when the JVM shuts shutting down, and use that to clean up our running system.
At the end of our main function, we can usually assume that the application will be running in background threads. However, quite often, these are all daemonised, and hence won’t prevent the JVM from shutting down when -main has returned. Hence, we call run-forever, which creates a semaphore with no permits, and then try to acquire one. Because the semaphore is essentially empty, this causes the thread to wait.
Setting up the system is reasonably self explanatory–I use the example of using an EDN configuration file, here, but it’s equally possible to extract the values directly from the command line, or the environment (perhaps using the environ module).
(ns horse.main
(:require
[clojure.tools.logging :as log]
[clojure.java.io :as io]
[clojure.edn :as edn]
[com.stuartsierra.component :as component])
(:gen-class))
(defn add-shutdown-hook! [^Runnable f]
(.addShutdownHook (Runtime/getRuntime)
(Thread. f)))
(defn logged-shutdown [system]
(log/info ::shutting-down)
(swap! system component/stop)
(log/info ::shutdown-done))
(defn run-forever []
(let [forever (java.util.concurrent.Semaphore. 0)]
(.acquire forever)))
(defn make-system [{:keys [stuff] :as config}]
(component/system-map
;; :thing (map->Thingy {:stuff stuff})
))
(defn -main [configfile & argv]
(log/info ::booting-from configfile)
(let [config (-> (io/reader configfile) slurp edn/read-string)
sys (atom (make-system config))]
(add-shutdown-hook! (partial logged-shutdown sys))
(log/info ::starting)
(swap! sys component/start)
(log/info ::running)
(run-forever)))