Containerbuddy is a shim written in Go to help make it easier to containerize existing applications. It can act as PID1 in the container and fork/exec the application. If the application exits then so does Containerbuddy.
Alternately, if your application double-forks (which is not recommended for containerized applications but hey we are taking about pre-container apps here!), you can run Containerbuddy as a side-by-side buddy process within the container. In that case the container will not die if the application dies, which can create complicated failure modes but which can be mitigated by having a good TTL health check to detect the problem and alert you.
Containerbuddy registers the application with Consul on start and periodically sends TTL health checks to Consul; should the application fail then Consul will not receive the health check and once the TTL expires will no longer consider the application node healthy. Meanwhile, Containerbuddy runs background workers that poll Consul, checking for changes in dependent/upstream service, and calling an external executable on change.
Read the complete article here.
