Salt service running

If you’re using salt to ensure you’re running your services and you constantly see your service being started it might be because the service doesn’t support the status command. 

----------
    State: - service
    Name:      openerp
    Function:  running
        Result:    True
        Comment:   Started Service openerp
        Changes:   openerp: True

If you tweak the salt minion to log trace messages you’ll see that salt calls service openerp status. 

/etc/salt/minion:
log_level: trace

# service salt-minion restart

/var/log/salt/minion
2013-10-02 19:26:32,602 [salt.loaded.int.module.cmdmod][INFO    ] Executing command 'service openerp status' in directory '/root'
2013-10-02 19:26:32,611 [salt.loaded.int.module.cmdmod][INFO    ] Executing command 'service openerp start' in directory '/root'

If we try that on the command line we’ll see that the openerp service doesn’t support the status option.

root@openerp-aq:~# service openerp status
Usage: openerp-server {start|stop|restart|force-reload}

That means salt gets an error and assumes the service isn’t running so it starts it.

The service state has an alternative way to check for the service running by looking at ps and grepping for the process. This is done by specifying the sig key.

openerp:
  service:
    - running
    - sig: openerp
    - require:
      - pkg: openerp

Now we finally see what we want, salt leaving the service running.

----------
    State: - service
    Name:      openerp
    Function:  running
        Result:    True
        Comment:   The service openerp is already running
        Changes:

In the log we now see,

2013-10-02 19:31:15,371 [salt.loaded.int.module.cmdmod][INFO    ] Executing command "ps -efH | grep 'openerp' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'" in directory '/root'

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