Check to see if python script is running

There are a myriad of options. One method is using system calls or python libraries that perform such calls for you. The other is simply to spawn out a process like:

ps ax | grep processName

and parse the output. Many people choose this approach, it isn’t necessarily a bad approach in my view.

There are very good packages for restarting processes on UNIX. One that has a great tutorial about building and configuring it is monit. With some tweaking you can have a rock solid proven technology keeping up your daemon.

I’m a big fan of Supervisor for managing daemons. It’s written in Python, so there are plenty of examples of how to interact with or extend it from Python. For your purposes the XML-RPC process control API should work nicely.

Of course the example from Dan will not work as it should be.

Indeed, if the script crash, rise an exception, or does not clean pid file, the script will be run multiple times.

I suggest the following based from another website:

This is to check if there is already a lock file existing

#/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
if os.access(os.path.expanduser("~/.lockfile.vestibular.lock"), os.F_OK):
        #if the lockfile is already there then check the PID number
        #in the lock file
        pidfile = open(os.path.expanduser("~/.lockfile.vestibular.lock"), "r")
        pidfile.seek(0)
        old_pid = pidfile.readline()
        # Now we check the PID from lock file matches to the current
        # process PID
        if os.path.exists("/proc/%s" % old_pid):
                print "You already have an instance of the program running"
                print "It is running as process %s," % old_pid
                sys.exit(1)
        else:
                print "File is there but the program is not running"
                print "Removing lock file for the: %s as it can be there because of the program last time it was run" % old_pid
                os.remove(os.path.expanduser("~/.lockfile.vestibular.lock"))

This is part of code where we put a PID file in the lock file

pidfile = open(os.path.expanduser("~/.lockfile.vestibular.lock"), "w")
pidfile.write("%s" % os.getpid())
pidfile.close()

This code will check the value of pid compared to existing running process., avoiding double execution.

I hope it will help.

A technique that is handy on a Linux system is using domain sockets:

import socket
import sys
import time

def get_lock(process_name):
    # Without holding a reference to our socket somewhere it gets garbage
    # collected when the function exits
    get_lock._lock_socket = socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)

    try:
        # The null byte () means the socket is created 
        # in the abstract namespace instead of being created 
        # on the file system itself.
        # Works only in Linux
        get_lock._lock_socket.bind('' + process_name)
        print 'I got the lock'
    except socket.error:
        print 'lock exists'
        sys.exit()


get_lock('running_test')
while True:
    time.sleep(3)

It is atomic and avoids the problem of having lock files lying around if your process gets sent a SIGKILL

You can read in the documentation for socket.close that sockets are automatically closed when garbage collected.

The other answers are great for things like cron jobs, but if you’re running a daemon you should monitor it with something like daemontools.

Consider the following example to solve your problem:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-

import os, sys, time, signal

def termination_handler (signum,frame):
    global running
    global pidfile
    print 'You have requested to terminate the application...'
    sys.stdout.flush()
    running = 0
    os.unlink(pidfile)

running = 1
signal.signal(signal.SIGINT,termination_handler)

pid = str(os.getpid())
pidfile = '/tmp/'+os.path.basename(__file__).split('.')[0]+'.pid'

if os.path.isfile(pidfile):
    print "%s already exists, exiting" % pidfile
    sys.exit()
else:
    file(pidfile, 'w').write(pid)

# Do some actual work here

while running:
  time.sleep(10)

I suggest this script because it can be executed one time only.

Try this other version

def checkPidRunning(pid):        
    '''Check For the existence of a unix pid.
    '''
    try:
        os.kill(pid, 0)
    except OSError:
        return False
    else:
        return True

# Entry point
if __name__ == '__main__':
    pid = str(os.getpid())
    pidfile = os.path.join("/", "tmp", __program__+".pid")

    if os.path.isfile(pidfile) and checkPidRunning(int(file(pidfile,'r').readlines()[0])):
            print "%s already exists, exiting" % pidfile
            sys.exit()
    else:
        file(pidfile, 'w').write(pid)

    # Do some actual work here
    main()

    os.unlink(pidfile)

Using bash to look for a process with the current script’s name. No extra file.

import commands
import os
import time
import sys

def stop_if_already_running():
    script_name = os.path.basename(__file__)
    l = commands.getstatusoutput("ps aux | grep -e '%s' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'| awk '{print $2}'" % script_name)
    if l[1]:
        sys.exit(0);

To test, add

stop_if_already_running()
print "running normally"
while True:
    time.sleep(3)

ps ax | grep processName

if yor debug script in pycharm always exit

pydevd.py --multiproc --client 127.0.0.1 --port 33882 --file processName

Rather than developing your own PID file solution (which has more subtleties and corner cases than you might think), have a look at supervisord — this is a process control system that makes it easy to wrap job control and daemon behaviors around an existing Python script.

The pid library can do exactly this.

from pid import PidFile

with PidFile():
  do_something()

It will also automatically handle the case where the pidfile exists but the process is not running.

try this:

#/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys, atexit

try:
    # Set PID file
    def set_pid_file():
        pid = str(os.getpid())
        f = open('myCode.pid', 'w')
        f.write(pid)
        f.close()

    def goodby():
        pid = str('myCode.pid')
        os.remove(pid)

    atexit.register(goodby)
    set_pid_file()
    # Place your code here

except KeyboardInterrupt:
    sys.exit(0)

Here is more useful code (with checking if exactly python executes the script):

#! /usr/bin/env python

import os
from sys import exit


def checkPidRunning(pid):
    global script_name
    if pid<1:
        print "Incorrect pid number!"
        exit()
    try:
        os.kill(pid, 0)
    except OSError:
        print "Abnormal termination of previous process."
        return False
    else:
        ps_command = "ps -o command= %s | grep -Eq 'python .*/%s'" % (pid,script_name)
        process_exist = os.system(ps_command)
        if process_exist == 0:
            return True
        else:
            print "Process with pid %s is not a Python process. Continue..." % pid
            return False


if __name__ == '__main__':
    script_name = os.path.basename(__file__)
    pid = str(os.getpid())
    pidfile = os.path.join("/", "tmp/", script_name+".pid")
    if os.path.isfile(pidfile):
        print "Warning! Pid file %s existing. Checking for process..." % pidfile
        r_pid = int(file(pidfile,'r').readlines()[0])
        if checkPidRunning(r_pid):
            print "Python process with pid = %s is already running. Exit!" % r_pid
            exit()
        else:
            file(pidfile, 'w').write(pid)
    else:
        file(pidfile, 'w').write(pid)

# main programm
....
....

os.unlink(pidfile)

Here is string:

ps_command = "ps -o command= %s | grep -Eq 'python .*/%s'" % (pid,script_name)

returns 0 if “grep” is successful, and the process “python” is currently running with the name of your script as a parameter .

A simple example if you only are looking for a process name exist or not:

import os

def pname_exists(inp):
    os.system('ps -ef > /tmp/psef')
    lines=open('/tmp/psef', 'r').read().split('n')
    res=[i for i in lines if inp in i]
    return True if res else False

Result:
In [21]: pname_exists('syslog')
Out[21]: True

In [22]: pname_exists('syslog_')
Out[22]: False

Came across this old question looking for solution myself.

Use psutil:

import psutil
import sys
from subprocess import Popen

for process in psutil.process_iter():
    if process.cmdline() == ['python', 'your_script.py']:
        sys.exit('Process found: exiting.')

print('Process not found: starting it.')
Popen(['python', 'your_script.py'])

My solution is to check for the process and command line arguments
Tested on windows and ubuntu linux

import psutil
import os

def is_running(script):
    for q in psutil.process_iter():
        if q.name().startswith('python'):
            if len(q.cmdline())>1 and script in q.cmdline()[1] and q.pid !=os.getpid():
                print("'{}' Process is already running".format(script))
                return True

    return False


if not is_running("test.py"):
    n = input("What is Your Name? ")
    print ("Hello " + n)

This is what I use in Linux to avoid starting a script if already running:

import os
import sys


script_name = os.path.basename(__file__)
pidfile = os.path.join("/tmp", os.path.splitext(script_name)[0]) + ".pid"


def create_pidfile():
    if os.path.exists(pidfile):
        with open(pidfile, "r") as _file:
            last_pid = int(_file.read())

        # Checking if process is still running
        last_process_cmdline = "/proc/%d/cmdline" % last_pid
        if os.path.exists(last_process_cmdline):
            with open(last_process_cmdline, "r") as _file:
                cmdline = _file.read()
            if script_name in cmdline:
                raise Exception("Script already running...")

    with open(pidfile, "w") as _file:
        pid = str(os.getpid())
        _file.write(pid)


def main():
    """Your application logic goes here"""


if __name__ == "__main__":
    create_pidfile()
    main()

This approach works good without any dependency on an external module.

I was looking for an answer on this and in my case, came to mind a very easy and very good solution, in my opinion (since it’s not possible to exist a false positive on this, I guess – how can the timestamp on the TXT be updated if the program doesn’t do it):

–> just keep writing on a TXT the current timestamp in some time interval, depending on your needs (here each half hour was perfect).

If the timestamp on the TXT is outdated relatively to the current one when you check, then there was a problem on the program and it should be restarted or what you prefer to do.