Make sure Apache restarts after a crash

This morning I noticed that, at some point during the night, Apache had crashed and not restarted. To stop this happening again I decided to write a small Python script that would be run by cron to make sure Apache was running.

Here's the script:

apache_auto_restart

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Apache Auto Restarter

import os

def main():
   p = os.popen("/usr/bin/pgrep apache")
   out = p.read()
   p.close()
   if out == "":
      print "Apache2 not running...\n"
      print "Restarting..."
      rstart = os.popen("/etc/init.d/apache2 restart")
      output = rstart.read()
      rstart.close()
      print output
   else:
      print "Apache2 running already."
   return 0
if __name__ == '__main__': 
   main()

To have it run automatically every half hour, add the following to /etc/crontab:

0,30 * * * * root /path/to/apache_auto_restart >/dev/null 2>&1

There could probably be some error correction somewhere in it to make sure Apache has actually restarted but; a) it's a quick and dirty fix, b) I'm really lazy and c) I figure most people would probably notice if their server has been down for longer than half an hour or so and go and investigate.