CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmemcached
Thomas
Thomas

Reputation: 4330

How to check if memcached is running and start it if not from python?

I'm developing a web application using python and memcached.

First I want to start memcached from my python program, and if I'm right subprocess.Popen(["memcached"]); will do it. What really bothers me is how to check if memcached is already running in the background.

I want something like 

if check_memcached():
    start_memcached();

The check_memcached() function should return true if memcached is not already running. Anybody got any idea how to do this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 5676

Answers (1)

Austin Phillips
Austin Phillips

Reputation: 15776

The best way to check may depend on your platform. Here's some methods you could try:

  • Try to connect to the memcached server. If a connection fails, assume that the server is not running.
  • If you expect memcached to be running locally, look for a PID file. On Debian this is usually located at /var/run/memcached.pid and contains the process id of the running memcached daemon. To be extra sure you could read the PID contained in the file and verify that a process with this PID is still running.
  • Use the subprocess module to run a command which can directly check for a locally running daemon. eg. Run the command pidof memcached using subprocess and check the return code.

Upvotes: 5

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