I was having problems with spawn-fcgi-standalone occasionally resulting in dead PHP processes, which caused 502 Bad Gateway errors on my site. Crontabbing an /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi start didn't help much, so I looked for other ways to do it. Supervisord looked promising.

Here’s how to get Supervisord:

apt-get install python-setuptools
easy_install supervisor

Here’s what to add to /etc/supervisord.conf:

[fcgi-program:php5-cgi]
socket=tcp://127.0.0.1:9000
command=/usr/bin/php5-cgi
numprocs=5
priority=999
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
user=www-data
autorestart=true
autostart=true
startsecs=1
startretries=3
stopsignal=QUIT
stopwaitsecs=10
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/php5-cgi.log
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=10MB

So far, so good. When I kill the php process, supervisord starts it back up. Progress!

supervisord doesn’t come with an init.d script, but you can get one for Ubuntu.