upstart respawn with two child processes

Question

I have an upstart script like so:

start on runlevel [2345]
respawn

script
  exec su - ubuntu -c "cd /opt/app; bin/widget 2>&1 | logger -t 'widget'"
end script

The problem is when the widget process crashes, it doesn't respawn. Presumably because the logger process is still running. Any way around this?

Answer 1

I would "outsource" the work to a bash script:

start on runlevel [2345]
respawn

script
  exec /path/to/bash/script
end script

the script

#! /bin/bash -e

su - ubuntu -c "cd /opt/app; bin/widget" |& logger -t 'widget'

exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}

The PIPESTATUS array in bash stores pipe return values, in this case we use the return value of the su command.