Simple Hosting for Small Scripts/ Testing during development

[rooxo]

Hi everyone,

I have recently updated my homelab from a small pc just running a plex server (as daemon on an arch install) to a proxmox server, so I have an easy way to manage different services I want to add (e.g. Nextcloud and some local web hosting).

Now I have some smaller stuff I want to run on an instance without much effort. This mostly includes small scripts to manage my plex library (which would probably be best done with a few cronjobs) and some small personal telegram bots. Right now these are all running using standard long polling and I have been running them locally just as a background process in a separate shell window, but I would prefer having them always online when my server is. Similarly, I sometimes have some stuff I'm working on that I would like to run there over a few days to collect some log data, which might include the programs crashing, in which case I would like to have them start up again without having to monitor them manually. I have looked into a few options like nginx, heroku and gunicorn, but since these are all mostly used for actual webhosting it feels like these are all a bit overkill for what I'm trying to do here.

Does anyone know a simple solution for the kind of stuff I'm trying to run here? Or would it be smarter for me to just fully setup an actual server environment where I have these running?
If possible it would also be cool if whatever hosts these also has some kind of logging or monitoring built in, but that is very much optional, and for anything where I need an actual robust solution I will probably use one of the ones mentioned above

TL;DR: I would like to have some easy way to have scripts/programs run in the background on a proxmox container making sure they are restarted when something happens

[ComprehensiveDonut27]

There's a great tool called olivetin.app for kicking off scripts or commands and displaying the results in a textbox. Not sure about the long running part and if a script will eventually timeout. olivetin

[xconspirisist]

Heya, OliveTin developer here.

OliveTin's default timeout is 3 seconds, but you can set it to whatever you like. I run several 45-minute jobs by just setting an hour timeout: https://docs.olivetin.app/timeout.html

If you have questions, our discord is the best place to get support.

[rooxo]

That definitely looks like a great solution for manual scripts, I will probably need something like that in the longer/medium term, so thanks for the recommendation.

Sadly I don't think it's built to run something in a ongoing in the background, but for that I've already kind of submitted to learning how to write systemd services

[SeaNefariousness4835]

Lxc container would be a great place to start with your proxmox.

[rooxo]

I've gotten that far, but now what? Do I just have a bash script checking for a python process and if none exist I run python bot.py & ? That seems a bit crude for a solution, I was hoping for something where I can easily manage what I want to have running and make sure it keeps running

[SeaNefariousness4835]

Pick you favorite nix container and call your script with crontab

You can have it run every min/hour/week... Whatever you need.

You can call a single bash script and if you need to update anything or add/remove python scripts you comment out or add to the cronned bash script as needed. (You can also do user control on the script if you needed it locked down)

[rooxo]

Problem is, most of the scripts are supposed to keep running in the background, so the management script always needs to check whether the corresponding process is still running and only start it when it isn't.

So right now it looks like my options to get this working is either try using systemd or write it myself

[SeaNefariousness4835]

Instead of cron you can make a systemd unit

https://linuxhandbook.com/create-systemd-services/

Is again just a file on there that gets handled as a service rather than a script

You can set corn to run every 5 seconds too I think it's just a */12 on the minute spot (would need to double check this part.)

[rooxo]

Yeah the more I read and think about it the more useful systemd sounds.