# \[OT\] Starting Mongrel on Mac: Launchd or Crontab?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-starting-mongrel-on-mac-launchd-or-crontab/90451>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 28, 2007, 10:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-starting-mongrel-on-mac-launchd-or-crontab/90451 "2007-03-28T22:48:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 10:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-starting-mongrel-on-mac-launchd-or-crontab/90451/1 "2007-03-28T22:48:35Z")

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I have some Rails apps I use on my Mac to do brutally stupid stuff like  
track  
time and activities. They’re always running, but each time I restart, I  
(duh) have to restart the Mongrels.

Well, I know better than that, right? So I dug around in Google to find  
out  
how people are getting Mongrels started using Launchd. There are some  
detailed posts, but none of them seemed to work. My hack-o-the-day was  
to  
use crontab, and I’m not certain that’s so bad, but could someone tell  
me:  
How do you use Launchd to get Mongrels running? Do you categorize them  
as  
Agents or Daemons? Even though these are stable and just work, what if I  
have to kill one off? Will I confuse anything or can I just use kill as  
usual (I’m guessing that Mongrel’s stop and restart commands won’t  
work).

Anybody else doing this?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 11:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-starting-mongrel-on-mac-launchd-or-crontab/90451/2 "2007-03-28T23:47:42Z")

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launchd is, in theory, the present and future of startup launching on  
Mac OS X. That said, the old methods still exist, are fairly simple  
to set up, and are a lot easier to debug. You might try a  
StartupItem (look in /Library/StartupItems) instead.

-faisal

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cwd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/cwd)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 11:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ot-starting-mongrel-on-mac-launchd-or-crontab/90451/3 "2007-03-28T23:58:43Z")

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> have to kill one off? Will I confuse anything or can I just use kill as  
> usual (I’m guessing that Mongrel’s stop and restart commands won’t work).
> 
> Anybody else doing this?

I don’t have mine always running so I wrote a widget to control them…

[http://blog.pjkh.com/articles/2006/12/20/mongrel-rails-dashboard-widget](http://blog.pjkh.com/articles/2006/12/20/mongrel-rails-dashboard-widget)

Worked great for me until I switched to litespeed. I switched because  
litespeed will shut down the rails processes if they aren’t used after a  
period of time freeing up ram for other things… I had a lot of apps,  
but  
didn’t use them very often, which sounds a little different than your  
scenerio so it might not make as much sense.

If you try litespeed keep this in mind as well:

[http://blog.pjkh.com/articles/2007/03/27/litespeed-osx-and-disk-scratching](http://blog.pjkh.com/articles/2007/03/27/litespeed-osx-and-disk-scratching)

-philip