12 Gems of Christmas #6 – childprocess

2012-12-07

Ruby has many different gems and APIs for spawning child processes but none I like more than childprocess. posix-spawn and open4 are popular alternatives but childprocess has a clean Ruby API and aims to work on all Ruby platforms.

Here we have an example setting up a child process pipeline, performing the equivalent of ps aux | grep -E 'redis|memcached'.

require 'childprocess'

listing = ChildProcess.build("ps", "aux")

search = ChildProcess.build("grep", '-E', %w(redis memcached).join('|'))
search.duplex = true
search.io.stdout = STDOUT
search.start

listing.io.stdout = search.io.stdin
listing.start
listing.wait

search.io.stdin.close
search.wait

With subprocesses, the tricky bit is usually hooking up the IO streams correctly. In this case, the duplex flag signals that you want to write to STDIN of the process (i.e. use it as the RHS of a pipe). Everything else is pretty straightforward; childprocess makes multi-processing with Ruby simple.

Tomorrow I’ll dive into a little gem which aims to improve Rails logging in production.