Installing

Installation instructions depend whether the system on which you’re attempting to install Supervisor has internet access.

Installing to A System With Internet Access

Internet-Installing With Pip

Supervisor can be installed with pip install:

  1. pip install supervisor

Depending on the permissions of your system’s Python, you might need to be the root user to install Supervisor successfully using pip.

You can also install supervisor in a virtualenv via pip.

Internet-Installing Without Pip

If your system does not have pip installed, you will need to download the Supervisor distribution and install it by hand. Current and previous Supervisor releases may be downloaded from PyPi. After unpacking the software archive, run python setup.py install. This requires internet access. It will download and install all distributions depended upon by Supervisor and finally install Supervisor itself.

Note

Depending on the permissions of your system’s Python, you might need to be the root user to successfully invoke python setup.py install.

Installing To A System Without Internet Access

If the system that you want to install Supervisor to does not have Internet access, you’ll need to perform installation slightly differently. Since both pip and python setup.py install depend on internet access to perform downloads of dependent software, neither will work on machines without internet access until dependencies are installed. To install to a machine which is not internet-connected, obtain the following dependencies on a machine which is internet-connected:

Copy these files to removable media and put them on the target machine. Install each onto the target machine as per its instructions. This typically just means unpacking each file and invoking python setup.py install in the unpacked directory. Finally, run supervisor’s python setup.py install.

Note

Depending on the permissions of your system’s Python, you might need to be the root user to invoke python setup.py install successfully for each package.

Installing a Distribution Package

Some Linux distributions offer a version of Supervisor that is installable through the system package manager. These packages are made by third parties, not the Supervisor developers, and often include distribution-specific changes to Supervisor.

Use the package management tools of your distribution to check availability; e.g. on Ubuntu you can run apt-cache show supervisor, and on CentOS you can run yum info supervisor.

A feature of distribution packages of Supervisor is that they will usually include integration into the service management infrastructure of the distribution, e.g. allowing supervisord to automatically start when the system boots.

Note

Distribution packages of Supervisor can lag considerably behind the official Supervisor packages released to PyPI. For example, Ubuntu 12.04 (released April 2012) offered a package based on Supervisor 3.0a8 (released January 2010).

Note

Users reported that the distribution package of Supervisor for Ubuntu 16.04 had different behavior than previous versions. On Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04, and 14.04, installing the package will configure the system to start supervisord when the system boots. On Ubuntu 16.04, this was not done by the initial release of the package. The package was fixed later. See Ubuntu Bug #1594740 for more information.

Creating a Configuration File

Once the Supervisor installation has completed, run echo_supervisord_conf. This will print a “sample” Supervisor configuration file to your terminal’s stdout.

Once you see the file echoed to your terminal, reinvoke the command as echo_supervisord_conf > /etc/supervisord.conf. This won’t work if you do not have root access.

If you don’t have root access, or you’d rather not put the supervisord.conf file in /etc/supervisord.conf, you can place it in the current directory (echo_supervisord_conf > supervisord.conf) and start supervisord with the -c flag in order to specify the configuration file location.

For example, supervisord -c supervisord.conf. Using the -c flag actually is redundant in this case, because supervisord searches the current directory for a supervisord.conf before it searches any other locations for the file, but it will work. See Running Supervisor for more information about the -c flag.

Once you have a configuration file on your filesystem, you can begin modifying it to your liking.