Indira is an application for turning Erlang applications into unix daemons with as little effort as possible.
Indira is intended for people writing command line interface for Erlang applications. In the current landscape of Erlang-OS integration this means mostly package maintainers and sysadmins who want to run their own Erlang code.
The application is named after Indira Toledo, a character of an excellent S-F novel titled "Mother of Demons" by Eric Flint.
Indira is a great help when you want Erlang application to cooperate with operating system. This is best visible with deploying Erlang code as binary packages (e.g. DEB or RPM), when the application needs to be stopped gracefully on system shutdown. Erlang doesn't have support for signal handlers, so an initscript needs tell the service to stop in a different way. Unfortunately, configuring distributed Erlang so that the initscript can connect while sysadmin retains ability to setup Erlang cluster is difficult. Indira solves this problem by providing separate administrative channel that can listen on unix socket.
You may also want to use Indira is if you want to configure an application with INI/TOML/YAML files and command line options, but preserve Erlang's original way of using application environment. Indira covers parsing command line arguments and simplifies setting environment parameters from configuration file.
The things above allow to lower the Erlang proficiency requirements for sysadmins, give them convenient administrative interface, and distribute Erlang applications in binary packages in easier and much more elegant way than before.
Indira is documented using EDoc. A local copy is generated with make doc
command to ./doc/ directory. An already generated online copy is available
at http://dozzie.jarowit.net/api/erlang-indira/.
Indira was written by Stanislaw Klekot . The primary distribution point is http://dozzie.jarowit.net/, with a secondary address on GitHub https://github.com/dozzie/indira.
Indira is distributed under 3-clause BSD license.