Supervisord on DigitalOcean App Platform

A production-ready template for running multi-process applications on DigitalOcean App Platform using Supervisord.

What is Supervisord?

Supervisord is a process control system for UNIX-like systems. It's designed for application-level process management, making it ideal for containerized environments where you need to run multiple related processes together.

Use Cases

• Web Service + Monitoring: Run your application with OpenTelemetry Collector or other monitoring sidecars
• Multi-Process Applications: Applications that need multiple related processes in one container
• Sidecar Pattern: Run auxiliary processes alongside your main application (logging agents, proxies, etc.)

What's Included

Running Processes:

1. Flask Web App - Example application on port 8080 with OpenTelemetry instrumentation
2. OTEL Collector - OpenTelemetry sidecar for observability
3. Both managed by Supervisord (process manager)

Endpoints:

• Process dashboard at / showing all running processes
• Health check endpoint at /health
• Test trace endpoint at /test-trace to verify OTEL instrumentation

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│   DigitalOcean App Platform         │
│                                     │
│  ┌───────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │    Container (Port 8080)      │  │
│  │                               │  │
│  │  ┌─────────────────────────┐  │  │
│  │  │   Supervisord (PID 1)   │  │  │
│  │  └──────────┬──────────────┘  │  │
│  │             │                 │  │
│  │    ┌────────┴────────┐        │  │
│  │    │                 │        │  │
│  │  ┌─▼──────┐    ┌────▼─────┐   │  │
│  │  │ Flask  │    │   OTEL   │   │  │
│  │  │  Web   │    │  Agent   │   │  │
│  │  │  App   │    │ (Sidecar)│   │  │
│  │  │ :8080  │    │          │   │  │
│  │  └────────┘    └──────────┘   │  │
│  │                               │  │
│  └───────────────────────────────┘  │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

Project Structure

supervisord-appplatform/
├── .do/
│   ├── app.yaml                      # App Platform deployment spec
│   └── deploy.template.yaml          # Deploy button template
├── app/
│   ├── app.py                        # Example Flask application
│   ├── requirements.txt              # Python dependencies
│   └── start.sh                      # Application startup script
├── config/
│   ├── supervisord.conf              # Supervisord configuration
│   └── otel-collector-config.yaml    # OpenTelemetry Collector config
├── Dockerfile                        # Container definition
├── docker-compose.yml                # Local development setup
└── Makefile                          # Development commands

Deployment Methods

One-Click Deploy

Click the "Deploy to DigitalOcean" button above to deploy instantly with zero configuration.

Deploy via CLI

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/AppPlatform-Templates/supervisord-appplatform.git
cd supervisord-appplatform

# Deploy to App Platform
doctl apps create --spec .do/app.yaml

To customize: Fork this repo, update the repo reference in your chosen template (.do/ folder) to point to your fork, then deploy.

Local Development

Run locally using Docker Compose:

docker-compose up

Access the app at http://localhost:8080 or http://127.0.0.1:8080

See LOCAL_DEVELOPMENT.md for detailed local development instructions.

Configure OpenTelemetry (Optional)

By default, traces/logs/metrics are exported to console logs (visible in App Platform Runtime Logs).

To send to production backends (Grafana Cloud, Datadog, Honeycomb, etc.), see OTEL_PRODUCTION.md.

To disable OTEL, remove the [program:otel-collector] section from config/supervisord.conf.

Resources

• Supervisord Documentation
• DigitalOcean App Platform Documentation
• App Spec Reference
• Troubleshooting Guide
• Local Development Guide

Getting Help

• GitHub Issues: Report bugs or request features
• DigitalOcean Community: community.digitalocean.com
• Support: DigitalOcean Support