Hello all,
We're happy to announce the first public release of rfcgi-spawn, a small utility that might come handy to system administrators. Currently, we're using it on our production servers running several rails/ruby applications with no problems so far.
Because we love the ruby community so much, we decided to publicly release most of our applications used in the administration, so expect more soon :-).
rfcgi-spawner comes with a small daemon (rfcgi-spawnerd :-P) that checks for fast-cgi applications and respawns them if the application is modified (that is, if you "touch" it) or if somehow it dies (the process is killed).
More info and documentation:
http://code.scio.cl/ruby/rfcgi-spawner/
You can grab a copy of the source code using svn:
svn co svn://svn.scio.cl/admintools/rfcgi-spawner/trunk rfcgi-spawner
or install it directly with gem:
gem install rfcgi-spawner --source http://code.scio.cl/ruby/
Please note, that this will also install the ioext extension, which adds a few useful methods to IO and Process (basically, IO.close and IO.dup2). This extension needs to be compiled. Nothing fancy is required though, just plain ansi-c.
We hope that this small utility will make your life a little easier as system administrators. 
regards,
···
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Rolando Abarca M.