That's not what kill timeout does; it specifies how long to wait after sending a polite "terminate" signal for the process to exit before giving up and launching nukes.
If you want to set a process time limit in the upstart way, the easiest way is probably to have something periodically issue a timer event, and use stop on timer. Alternately (and perhaps more generally), create a wrapper program which forks a small process which sends an event after a time period, and stop on that event.
For more information and best practices, see The Upstart Cookbook.
I had the same desire to configure pg this way. For me, I wanted multiple clusters, each with their own independent scheduler (pgagent). When I shut down an individual cluster pgagent will stop automatically, but when I start a cluster I want pgagent to start automatically for that cluster also. If I forget to start the scheduler when I start a cluster, I'm in trouble.
I had Googled around, but never found a good solution to running PostgreSQL under Upstart. Most of the solutions explicitly started the postmaster instead of using the pg_wrapper commands. With the way Upstart works, this seems dangerous and could result in data loss in rare situations.
Thus, I forged ahead and tried to create my own Upstart scripts that would do the job. I found that it was very difficult to capture the correct PID of both the cluster and its pgagent instance. Eventually however, I realized that with PostgreSQL, you don't actually care about PIDs. You care about versions and clusters. Once I realized that, it all came together, and I created the following three scripts:
The first I call pg_versions.conf.
description "PostgreSQL Version Controller"
author "Brian Myers"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [016]
env DEFAULT_VERSIONS="9.3"
pre-start script
if [ -z $VERSIONS ]; then
VERSIONS=$DEFAULT_VERSIONS
fi
for version in $VERSIONS
do
for cluster in $(pg_lsclusters -h | grep $version | cut -d" " -f 2)
do
if [ `tail -1 /etc/postgresql/$version/$cluster/start.conf` = "auto" ]; then
start pg_cluster version=$version cluster=$cluster
fi
done
done
end script
post-stop script
if [ -z $VERSIONS ]; then
VERSIONS=$DEFAULT_VERSIONS
fi
for version in $VERSIONS
do
for cluster in $(pg_lsclusters -h | grep $version | cut -d" " -f 2)
do
stop pg_cluster version=$version cluster=$cluster
done
done
end script
Next is pg_cluster.conf.
description "PostgreSQL Cluster Controller"
author "Brian Myers"
instance $version-$cluster
pre-start script
if [ `pg_lsclusters -h | grep $version | grep $cluster | cut -d" " -f 4` = "down" ]; then
pg_ctlcluster $version $cluster start || :
start pg_agent version=$version cluster=$cluster || :
fi
end script
post-stop script
if [ -e "/var/run/postgresql/pgagent-$version-$cluster.pid" ]; then
stop pg_agent version=$version cluster=$cluster
fi
if [ `pg_lsclusters -h | grep $version | grep $cluster | cut -d" " -f 4` = "online" ]; then
pg_ctlcluster $version $cluster stop
fi
end script
And finally pg_agent.conf.
description "PgAgent Controller"
author "Brian Myers"
instance ${version}-${cluster}
setuid postgres
pre-start script
PORT=`pg_lsclusters -h | grep $version | grep $cluster | cut -d" " -f 3`
if [ -z `psql -c "select schema_name FROM information_schema.schemata WHERE schema_name = 'pgagent';" -d postgres -p $PORT | grep pgagent` ]; then
stop ; exit 0
fi
PGAGENTDIR=`which pgagent`
PGAGENTOPTIONS="host=/var/run/postgresql dbname=postgres user=postgres port=$PORT"
start-stop-daemon --start --oknodo --name "pga$version$cluster" --exec $PGAGENTDIR -- $PGAGENTOPTIONS
pgrep -f "$PGAGENTDIR.+$PORT" > /var/run/postgresql/pgagent-$version-$cluster.pid
end script
post-stop script
start-stop-daemon --stop --oknodo --pidfile /var/run/postgresql/pgagent-$version-$cluster.pid
if [ -w /var/run/postgresql/pgagent-$version-$cluster.pid ]; then
rm -f /var/run/postgresql/pgagent-$version-$cluster.pid
fi
end script
If you want more than just the 9.3 version, just add the versions to the env DEFAULT_VERSIONS="9.3" line separated by spaces.
With these, I can:
Start all clusters not already running:
sudo initctl start pg_versions
Start all clusters for a particular version not already running:
sudo initctl start pg_versions version=9.3
Start a particular cluster, auto-starting pgagent for that cluster, but only if the cluster is pgagent enabled:
sudo initctl start pg_cluster version=9.3 cluster=main
Start a cluster's pgagent if the cluster is pgagent enabled:
sudo initctl start pg_agent version=9.3 cluster=main
Change start to stop to get the inverse behavior. Of course everything starts up on boot and shuts down on stop via pg_ctlcluster, so no data loss. I did have to disable the init.d scripts via bum.
I'm sure these could be cleaned up or done in even better ways. The pg_agent script for example -- I could never figure out why using script or exec couldn't capture the correct PID. Eventually I gave up and managed the pid file myself, but it's still a mystery. It was probably my very soft shell scripting skills.
Note also that if you shut down clusters manually with pg_ctlcluster these Upstart jobs will still show as running even though the associated versions/clusters are not. Not a big deal because you can just restart them with either pg_ctlcluster or initctl, but for that reason I suggest using initctl to control your clusters if you deploy these jobs.
In any case, these work quite well for me.
Best Answer
An easy way to check your script syntax is with the following command:
I've found that even with a valid Upstart file if the file didn't exist when the server was booted last I have to reboot the server for Upstart to see the file.