Service auto-restart

Pebble’s service manager automatically restarts services that exit unexpectedly.

By default, this is done whether the exit code is zero or non-zero, but you can change this using the on-success and on-failure fields in a configuration layer. The possible values for these fields are:

• restart: restart the service and enter a restart-backoff loop (the default behaviour).

• shutdown: shut down and exit the Pebble daemon (with exit code 0 if the service exits successfully, exit code 10 otherwise)

  • success-shutdown: shut down with exit code 0 (valid only for on-failure)

  • failure-shutdown: shut down with exit code 10 (valid only for on-success)

• ignore: ignore the service exiting and do nothing further

In restart mode, the first time a service exits, Pebble waits the backoff-delay, which defaults to half a second. If the service exits again, Pebble calculates the next backoff delay by multiplying the current delay by backoff-factor, which defaults to 2.0 (doubling). The increasing delay is capped at backoff-limit, which defaults to 30 seconds.

The backoff-limit value is also used as a “backoff reset” time. If the service stays running after a restart for backoff-limit seconds, the backoff process is reset and the delay reverts to backoff-delay.