Workers

Workers

Workers are programs that don't run under control of Apache, because they handle tasks that don't need to happen synchronously to a user's request (whether triggered by one or not), or because running them under Apache would consume excessive resources.

Some workers process TheSchwartz or Gearman requests. Those normally run under control of worker-manager (see below). Some workers are manual, and depending on their purpose, can run either under control of worker-manager or be started by cron, or even just once when {re)starting the server. (Manual workers are a mixed lot, and there's no "one size fits all" option for them.)

Using worker-manager and workers.conf
bin/worker-manager takes care of starting, stopping, and restarting workers to maintain the numbers of workers set in etc/workers.conf for each host it runs on. The  syntax is pretty straightforward and described in the file itself. To start  for normal use (daemonized), use:

Or, if you want it to stay in the foreground and display progress/debug messages, use:

In both cases, killing it will also kill the workers it started.

Individually
You can also start individual workers from the shell prompt, by typing:

Most workers accept the  or   flag to request extra debugging output and stay in the foreground when started from the shell prompt, so ^C should work to kill them.

Using cron or at server boot time
Please refer to your OS documentation. The crontab(1) and init(8) manpages are probably most relevant.

List of workers
Note: I probably got some of that wrong. Any corrections welcome, especially where I say "not sure".