shep

The shep binary. shep is a process manager written in Rust: one binary runs a daemon called the shepherd, which keeps a flock of your long-running processes alive, captures what they print, and says plainly when something is wrong.

It runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. The Windows tier is the newest of the three and refuses three things deliberately: no graceful signal outside the shepherd channel, no shep startup, and no user/group. The repository README has the reasoning for each.

Write a Flockfile.toml. Two fields is a complete one:

[[app]]
name = "web"
script = "./server"

Then start it. You never launch the daemon yourself, because shep start notices nothing is listening and re-execs itself in the background.

$ shep start Flockfile.toml
$ shep ls --style bare
ID  NAME    STATUS  PID   RESTARTS  EXIT  CPU    MEM    UPTIME  FOLD     SMIT
1   web     online  1001  1         -     12.5%  48.1M  1m      backend  -
2   worker  online  1002  2         -     12.5%  48.1M  2m      backend  -

shep bleats follows the logs, and shep logs is the same command for people who prefer the boring word. Every themed verb has a straight alias that works forever. Everything renders as --format json too, under a versioned envelope, so you can pipe it somewhere without scraping columns.

shep import reads a real pm2 dump and writes a Flockfile out of it.

This crate builds three binaries, not one: shep itself, plus shep-runtime and shep-dev — thin wrappers that prepend runtime and dev before parsing, for use as a container ENTRYPOINT (shep runtime and shep dev work identically through the shep binary; the aliases exist so a container image needs no shell to supply the verb). cargo install shep installs all three.

Embedding shep in another program is shep-client's job, not this crate's — shep exposes nothing beyond its three main* entry points, each of which owns the whole process (exit code, argv, signal handling) the way a CLI is expected to.

The repository README has the full lexicon, what works today, and what is not built yet. shep is pre-1.0, so anything can still change, and several v1.0 items are still missing.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option.