Terminating application during startup

[Serge Aleynikov]

How would you recommend to deal with a problem when there's a syntax 
error in the application's config file?  It get's parsed before the call 
to start/2.

Serge

Gunilla Arendt wrote:
> Then let your application recognize that it cannot start,
> print out an error message and call erlang:halt(N) with an appropriate
> error code N.
> 
> --------------
> -module(my).
> 
> -export([start/2]).
> 
> start(normal, [foo]) ->
>     io:format("Cannot start due to whatever~n", []),
>     erlang:halt(1).
> ---------------
> 
> % erl -boot my -noshell
> Cannot start due to whatever
> %
> 
> 
> Regards, Gunilla
> 
> Fredrik Thulin wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday 22 March 2006 10:42, Gunilla Arendt wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> This bug is fixed in OTP R11B.
>>
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>>> I'm not quite sure what you mean with "terminating nicely". If you
>>> mean that you want the node to survive even if an application fails
>>> to start, set the type of the application to transient in the .rel
>>> file.
>>
>>
>> I'm using Erlang to write a SIP-server that I want to make work like 
>> most other server softwares people are used to, so that it can be used 
>> without any knowledge about Erlang, beam, Mnesia and so on, just 
>> regular system administration skills.
>>
>> In my opinion, this means that if certain fatal errors occur during 
>> startup, the Erlang VM (whole node) should terminate with
>>    * a nice and understandable error message on standard output
>>
>> and
>>
>>    * a non-zero exit status so that people can start the server from a 
>>      shellscript and know if it failed or succeeded.
>>
>> Also, the generation of erl_crash.dump should be avoided when I (as 
>> programmer) don't think it is needed (for example, the server could be 
>> started in a just-test-the-config-syntax mode).
>>
>> /Fredrik