runit is a great init scheme that you can use along with your existing init system. It makes it really easy to create service configurations for APIs and other long-running programs.

We’re using runit with Fedora at the moment, but we’re moving to Amazon Linux and need to bring runit with us. Getting runit on Amazon Linux is a little complicated. It’s not something you can simply yum install runit since it’s not a part of the official Amazon Linux package list¹. EPEL doesn’t have it either.

I figured I had two options left:

1. Compile it myself
2. Use https://github.com/imeyer/runit-rpm and build an RPM

Fortunately, I found “Running runit on Amazon Linux AMI” and that offered a great workaround: use BusyBox! I had no idea BusyBox included runit. I guess that says something about how useful BusyBox is, and how minimal runit is.

The first thing you need to do is install BusyBox.

yum install busybox

Then, create some symlinks (as root) to let BusyBox handle runit programs.

busybox --list | awk '/runsv|chpst|svlog|^sv$/' | \
    xargs -I{} ln -sv /sbin/busybox /sbin/{}

After that, you can set up your runit services as usual.

1. Here is the Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 packages list:
   https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2016.09-packages/