script to start erlang code - erlang

Question

I am trying to build a script on ubuntu to start some Erlang code of mine:
the script is something like:
#!/bin/sh
EBIN=$HOME/path_to_beams
ERL=/usr/local/bin/erl
export HEART_COMMAND="$EBIN/starting_script start"
case $1 in
start)
$ERL -sname mynode -pa $EBIN \
-heart -detached -s my_module start_link
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|debug}"
exit 1
esac
exit 0
but I'm having a couple of problems.
First of all, the code can be executed only if the script is in the same directory as the beams, this seems strange to me, I double checked the paths, so why doesn't the -pa flag work?
Second, the script (without the -pa) works fine, but if I try to start instead of the main module (a gen_server) its supervisor (-s my_module_sup start_link) it doesn't work...this is strange, because if I start the supervisor from a normal shell everything works fine.
Third, the -heart flag, should restart the script in case of failure, but if I kill the process with a normal Unix kill, the process is not restarted.
Can someone give me some hints?
Thanks in advance,
pdn

Answer 1

The first thing that comes to mind is that you're using erlexport instead of erl. Not sure why you're doing this (I've not heard of erlexport before). Try it with erl instead.
Your -heart flag won't have meaning if the Erlang node itself is killed because the process can't keep itself alive. You would need another process running that monitors the Erlang process and restarts it if killed.