On baker, I’m running two lisp images: autobench’s web interface, and a chavatar instance for my girlfriend who is currently in St. Petersburg.

Starting these lisp images manually using detachtty is somewhat tedious, so I wrote/modified two scripts to aid me with starting/attaching to/starting swank in/stopping these images. lisp-images is an init.d script that starts one or all lisp images that are defined in /etc/lisp-start.d/ and the other, start-stop-lisp-image does the actual work. Note that they need start-stop-daemon to work; I’ve tested them on debian, and I’m not sure about availability of start-stop-daemon on other distributions, so you may need a debian-based distribution to run them.

To install the scripts, put start-stop-lisp-image into /usr/local/sbin and lisp-images into /etc/init.d, with appropriate permissions.

Also, you need a patched detachtty. Marco Baringer’s patch for the –eval option is on the detachtty bug page. apt-get source detachtty, patch, fakeroot debian/rules binary and dpkg -i ../detachtty*.deb was all I had to do on my machine.

Defining a lisp image to run is pretty easy: You drop a file into /etc/lisp-start.d/ that is sourced by the lisp image control shell script.

A typical lisp image definition (for my chavatar instance) looks like this:

# The user to whom to switch before running the lisp image
RUN_AS="asf"

# these paths must be absolute:
# Base directory; we chdir to it before running the lisp
ABROOT="/home/asf/dl/svn/chavatar"
# Directory where detachtty places its pipe and pid file
VARROOT=$ABROOT/+var
# Directory where detachtty dribble output goes
LOGROOT=$ABROOT/+log

# The command that we use to run the lisp.
LISP_LOAD="/home/asf/bin/sbcl --noinform --userinit $ABROOT/+web-userinit.lisp"

# The port where we start swank on demand.
SWANKPORT=4008

Give it a descriptive name, and you’re ready to roll. run /etc/init.d/lisp-images start image-name and you should see:

Starting Lisp images: image-name.

To attach to the lisp, run /etc/init.d/lisp-images attach image-name.

Init.d operation is easy, too: /etc/init.d/lisp-images operates on all lisp images, if no images are given on the command line. This means that you can create symlinks in /etc/rc*.d/ and the images will be automatically started on startup and stopped on shutdown.

If you want more information on how to use this setup, once it’s working, see Bill Clementson’s summary of nice things to do with lisp webapps.

Credits for these scripts go to Marco Baringer who wrote the attachtty patch and the original ucwctl, from which most of start-stop-lisp-image’s meat is copied; and to Helmut Eller, not only for the awesome SLIME, but also for figuring out that sbcl in detachtty has no *debug-io*, which prevented the scripts’ swank functionality from working.