Individual View Source

Process adapter to handle singleton processes in Elixir applications.

The problem

Sometimes, when you start your program on cluster with MASTER<->MASTER strategy, some of your modules should be started only on one node at a time. This is common pattern, which is called CLUSTER SINGLETON. These modules can be thus be registered within :global module, but :global doesn't handle name conflicts and restarts.

Solution

Individual will cover working with :global module by itself. It will ensure, that ONLY one defined module at a time is working on a cluster, and also will restart the process on another node in node with working process will fail.

Default name conflicts resolution

If the cluster is starting in the same time, Individual will give time gape of 5 seconds. Within it, every node has the same probability to become a leader.

After 5 seconds gap, oldest node will always be a leader.

This solution should prevent the situation, when node that is added to the cluster can kill already working processes to restart the by nodeself.

Split Brain Resolution

Since Individual uses :global module, there is a common problem with cluster splits. In this case, each part of previous stable cluster will have it's own process, thus this process stops to be singleton. In current implementation, Individual does not resolve this problems for you, you should resolve them by yourself.

(If you have great ideas of doing this - welcome to your PRs to this repo!)

Usage

Wrap your worker or supervisor specification inside any of your supervisors with Individual call, passing supervisor specification as an argument for Individual.

Your worker or supervisor can register itself with some name or not - Individual will take care about registering it in a global scope.

Examples

# Simple call:
def start(_type, _args) do
  Supervisor.start_link([
    {Individual, MyModule}
  ], strategy: :one_for_one, name: Individual.Supervisor)
end

# Call with args:
def start(_type, _args) do
  Supervisor.start_link([
    {Individual, {MyModule, %{foo: :bar}}}
  ], strategy: :one_for_one, name: Individual.Supervisor)
end

# To start multiple processes with same name:
def start(_type, _args) do
  Supervisor.start_link([
    {Individual, Supervisor.child_spec({MyModule, []}, id: Test1)},
    {Individual, Supervisor.child_spec({MyModule, []}, id: Test2)}
  ], strategy: :one_for_one, name: Individual.Supervisor)
end

Starting cluster

iex --name a@127.0.0.1 -S mix
iex --name b@127.0.0.1 -S mix
...

Changelog

0.3.2

Fixing bug with strategies
Fixing bug with pid logging

0.3.1

ENHANCEMENTS

Adding Individual.Registry, that proxies :global module calls. It will prevent process recreation if the node was just added to working cluster.

0.2.1

ENHANCEMENTS

Adding Individual.Wrapper module, that allows to control GenServer, that don't register themselves in :global scope.

0.1.1

ENHANCEMENTS

Beautifying observer's output

Installation

The package can be installed by adding :individual to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:individual, "~> 0.3"}
  ]
end

Copyright and License

This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT License. See the LICENSE.md file for more details.

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