go-init-sentinel

A minimal init system capable of watching files for changes and sending signals for reload, shutdown, etc.

go-init-sentinel is intended as a wrapper for processes that need to be notified when a configuration file or TLS certificate is updated by an external process. For example, a wrapped nginx process can be sent a SIGHUP to reload configuration including TLS certificates.

Example use cases:

• An app running in Kubernetes with a sidecar that is updating TLS certificates from Vault can use go-init-sentinel to detect updates and signal the app to reload the certificate.
• An external process fetching new certificates and updating a Kubernetes SecretVolume mount. go-init-sentinel can detect updates to the mounted volume and signal the app to reload.

Suitable for use as pid-1 in a docker container. go-init-sentinel will forward signals to the child process.

A simple stat()-based polling mechanism is used to detect file changes. The default interval is 10 seconds and may be customized via the -interval flag. stat() is used as the change detection method because experimentation showed that real-time notification interfaces such as inotify had a variety of edge cases and was dependent on the method in which files were updated. A simple "stat on interval" approach is simple, reliable, and works in a variety of cases including with Kubernetes SecretVolume and ConfigMap mounts.

Install

• Binary releases are available for multiple platforms on GitHub release page.
• Docker images are also available.

Install using multi-stage Docker build:

FROM joemiller/go-init-sentinel as go-init-sentinel
...

COPY --from=go-init-sentinel /go-init-sentinel /go-init-sentinel
...

Usage

Typical usage is via Docker ENTYRPOINT:

Watch a certificate for updates, send SIGHUP on change:

...
ENTRYPOINT ["/go-init-sentinel", "-watch=/certs/stunnel.pem:SIGHUP", "--"]
CMD ["/usr/bin/stunnel", "/config/stunnel.conf"]

The -watch flag may be specified multiple tiems to watch multiple files. Each file change may send a different signal.

...
ENTRYPOINT ["/go-init-sentinel",
            "-watch=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:SIGHUP",
            "-watch=/certs/tls.pem:SIGHUP",
            "--"]
CMD ["/usr/bin/nginx"]

A random amount of time can be added to the check interval by adding the -splay flag. This can be useful if you have many instances (pods) where the reload operation may be slow and you want to avoid all instances being unavailable at the same time. The splay time added to the interval will be between "0-<interval>" seconds.