We wanted to release a first version of Circus before Pycon originally. Then Pycon was here, so we decided we would release it before Pycon would end. And Pycon ended. And we had a few bugs to fix.

But today it's happening !

Circus 0.1 is an alpha release, don't use it in production yet !

But this first release contains a lot of stuff already:

• a pub/sub channel so you can monitor what's going on.
• circusctl : an amazing console script that let you interact with the system.
• a full documentation for the circusctl CLI.
• an API that's simple enough in most cases.
• ... many more things really. I had to stop Benoit from adding features ;) -- did I mention that Benoit is amazing ?

I also added a section on how Circus is different from other tools here: http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html#why-should-i-use-circus-instead-of-x , since a lot of people asked about it.

One very important feature for me is to be able to use Circus with a few lines of Python in a program that needs to spawn workers. The use case for me is to run Powerhose, a library that let you dispatch some tasks across several workers, no matter what language they're built with.

This is all it takes to run and maintain 4 workers:

from circus import get_arbiter

arbiter = get_arbiter("worker", 4)
try:
    arbiter.start()
finally:
    arbiter.stop()

Links:

• the doc: http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
• the release: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/circus/0.1
• the repo: https://github.com/mozilla-services/circus

Please let us know what you think !