Django: Gracefully restart nginx + fastcgi sites to reflect code changes?

Common situation: I have a client on my server who may update some of the code in his python project. He can ssh into his shell and pull from 开发者_JS百科his repository and all is fine -- but the code is stored in memory (as far as I know) so I need to actually kill the fastcgi process and restart it to have the code change.

I know I can gracefully restart fcgi but I don't want to have to manually do this. I want my client to update the code, and within 5 minutes or whatever, to have the new code running under the fcgi process.

Thanks

First off, if uptime is important to you, I'd suggest making the client do it. It can be as simple as giving him a command called deploy-code. Using your method, if there is an error in their code, your method requires a 10 minute turnaround (read: downtime) for fixing it, assuming he gets it correct.

That said, if you actually want to do this, you should create a daemon which will look for files modified within the last 5 minutes. If it detects one, it will execute the reboot command.

Code might look something like:

import os, time
CODE_DIR = '/tmp/foo'

while True:
    if restarted = True:
        restarted = False
        time.sleep(5*60)

    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(CODE_DIR):
        if restarted=True:
            break
        for filename in files:
            if restared=True:
                break
            updated_on = os.path.getmtime(os.path.join(root, filename))
            current_time = time.time()
            if current_time - updated_on <= 6 * 60: # 6 min
                # 6 min could offer false negatives, but that's better
                # than false positives
                restarted = True
                print "We should execute the restart command here."