Using God to monitor Unicorn – Start exited with non-zero code = 1

I haven’t used unicorn as an app server, but I’ve used god for monitoring before.

If I remember rightly when you start god and give your config file, it automatically starts whatever you’ve told it to watch. Unicorn is probably already running, which is why it’s throwing the error.

Check this by running god status once you’ve started god. If that’s not the case you can check on the command line what the comand’s exit status is:

/usr/local/bin/unicorn_rails -c /home/my-linux-user/my-rails-app/config/unicorn.rb -E production -D;
echo $?;

that echo will print the exit status of the last command. If it’s zero, the last command reported no errors. Try starting unicorn twice in a row, I expect the second time it’ll return 1, because it’s already running.

EDIT:

including the actual solution from comments, as this seems to be a popular response:

You can set an explicit user and group if your process requires to be run as a specific user.

God.watch do |w|
  w.uid = 'root'
  w.gid = 'root'

  # remainder of config
end