I ended up using Sander Marechal's code whose site is currently down so here's the link to a pastebin : http://pastebin.com/FWBUfry5
Below you can find an example of how you can use it, it produce the behavior I expected : it does not allow you to start two instances.
import sys, time
from daemon import Daemon
class MyDaemon(Daemon):
def run(self):
while True:
time.sleep(1)
if __name__ == "__main__":
daemon = MyDaemon('/tmp/daemon-example.pid')
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
if 'start' == sys.argv[1]:
daemon.start()
elif 'stop' == sys.argv[1]:
daemon.stop()
elif 'restart' == sys.argv[1]:
daemon.restart()
else:
print "Unknown command"
sys.exit(2)
sys.exit(0)
else:
print "usage: %s start|stop|restart" % sys.argv[0]
sys.exit(2)