cute program for managing long running processes in a (slightly) more sophisticated way than tmux.

links

• crates.io
• docs.rs

overview

sopht consists of two programs: a server (sophtd) which runs on a unix socket and listens for connections from a sopht client (sopht). the server is responsible for starting and managing any processes the client requests. the client is responsible for validating the user's commands, communicating with the server, and finally conveying its response in a readable way to the user.

sopht is a user-level level program. this means that each user in a multi-user environment is encouraged to have their own instance of sophtd running in the background. sopht should never be run as the root/admin user! in fact, it will fail if run as a privileged user like root because this user has no home directory, which sopht needs to create the unix socket.

usage

sopht v0.2.0
cute process manager
(slightly) more sophisticated than tmux

commands:
  help            - prints this message
  hello           - requests the server greet you. kinda like a ping command,
                    but friendlier
  shutdown        - shuts the server down gracefully
  start <..>      - attempts to run the rest of the arguments <..> as a command
                    and begins managing the resulting process. pass
                    "--restart <policy>" to set the restart policy of the
                    process. valid restart policies are "never", "always", and
                    "on-failure". if setting the restart policy to "on-failure",
                    the "--retries <retry-count>" option must also be specified
  output <pid>    - completely retrives the output of the process with the
                    specified PID
  status          - retrieves the status of all managed processes
  stop <pid>      - stops the process with the specified PID and sets its
                    restart policy to "never"
  restart <pid>   - stops the process with the specified PID and runs the same
                    command again, creating a new process with a different PID
  send <pid> <..> - sends the rest of the arguments <..> as input to the process
                    with PID <p>. a newline is automatically appended onto the
                    input given to the process
  change-policy   - changes the policy of process with PID <pid> to the policy
    <pid> <policy>  given by <policy>. unlike the "start" command, the policy is
                    written inline like "on-failure 3" or "always"

contributing

i don't have any workflow set up for contributions right now, but feel free to send patches, questions, discussion, etc. to the appropriate mailing list on sourcehut!

build & install

currently, sopht is hosted solely on sourcehut. it follows the regular cargo build procedure though, so just clone this repository and build it. (make sure you're using the --release option for optimized and stripped binaries!) after that, the best way to install sopht currently is to just use the builtin install program to copy it to /usr/bin:

install ./target/release/sopht /usr/local/bin/sopht
install ./target/release/sophtd /usr/local/bin/sophtd

additionally, sopht can be installed via [crates.io] if you have cargo:

cargo install sopht