Four Ways to Auto-Restart a Python Script After a Crash, Compared

Python scripts that crash due to unhandled exceptions stay dead until manually restarted, posing a reliability problem for bots, workers, and pollers meant to run continuously. Developers have four main options to address this: a bash while loop, a try/except block around the main function, systemd's Restart=on-failure directive, and a third-party library called StayPresent. The bash loop is simple but restarts endlessly without limits, while the try/except approach keeps the same process alive, risking restarts into a corrupted memory state. Systemd offers robust supervision with restart caps but requires system-level access unavailable on most PaaS platforms like Render or Railway. StayPresent runs the script as a managed subprocess with configurable restart limits and backoff, works across PaaS, Docker, and VPS environments, and correctly distinguishes a clean exit from a genuine crash.