Here is the spawn-fcgi-php script that I came up with:

#! /bin/sh
 
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          spawn-fcgi-php
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts FastCGI for PHP
# Description:       starts FastCGI for PHP using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO
 
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
NAME=spawn-fcgi-php
PID=/var/run/spawn-fcgi-php.pid
DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/spawn-fcgi
DAEMON_OPTS="-f /usr/bin/php-cgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 55155 -u www-data -g www-data -P $PID"
 
test -x $DAEMON || exit 0
 
set -e
 
case "$1" in
  start)
        echo "Starting $NAME: "
        start-stop-daemon --start --pidfile $PID --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
        echo "done."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo "Stopping $NAME: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop  --pidfile $PID --retry 5
        rm -f $PID
        echo "done."
        ;;
  restart)
        echo "Stopping $NAME: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop  --pidfile $PID --retry 5
        rm -f $PID
        echo "done..."
        sleep 1
        echo "Starting $NAME: "
        start-stop-daemon --start --pidfile $PID --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
        echo "done."
        ;;
  *)
        echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/$NAME {start|stop|restart}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac
 
exit 0

A pretty straight forward script the does just two things: start and stop. The restart is just a convenience option, composed of a stop plus a start with a sleep 1 in between.

start

The script starts spawn-fcgi from lightty with a couple of options, most importantly a port and a pid-file. By default, spawn-fcgi will start up 5 child instances of php-cgi. So a quick ps aux | grep cgi will show 6 processes. From the limited (aka non-existent) performance data of my blog, this seems like a fine number.

stop

The script stops all those instances by sending a SIGTERM (-15) to the parent process recorded in the pid-file. Stopping with the --retry 5 option, will first send the default SIGTERM signal and check for 5 seconds if the process is still running, then send a KILL (-9) signal and wait another 5 seconds before erroring out.

Digging Deeper: When stopping, pass only one matching option to the start-stop-daemon. In most cases, it’s easiest to just pass the pid-file via the --pidfile $PID option (you might find some scripts online that pass --exec $DAEMON as a second matching option, but this didn’t work for me).

Just copy this script into /etc/init.d/, given it 755 permissions, and add it to the init sequence with sudo update-rc.d spawn-fcgi-php defaults. After a quick reboot, you should see 6 php-cgi processes running.