Lib.rs

Pitchfork

Daemons with DX

Pitchfork is a CLI for launching daemons with a focus on developer experience.

Use-cases

• launching development services like web APIs and databases
• running rsync/unison to synchronize directories with a remote machine
• cross-platform systemd alternative that requires far less boiler-plate

Features

• automatically start services on boot
• only starting services if they have not already been started
• restarting services on failure
• starting services only when working in a project directory—then automatically stopping when you leave

Workflows

Here's some common ways to use pitchfork.

Launching a one-off service

This workflow is an alternative to something like shell jobs—mytask &. This just runs a process in the background:

pitchfork run docs "npm start docs-dev-server"

You need to label the service with a name, in this case "docs". Once it's started, "docs" will be how we reference it. If you run pitchfork run docs "..." again, it will not do anything if the service is still running—this way you can start one-off services without thinking if you've already done so.

On pitchfork run, pitchfork will emit the output of npm start docs-dev-server for a few seconds. If it fails during that time, it will exit non-zero to help you see if the service was configured/setup correctly.

Adding a service to a project

A project may have several services defined, this is configured in pitchfork.toml in the root of the project:

[services]
redis = "redis-server"
api = "npm run server:api"
docs = "npm run server:docs"

You can start all the services with pitchfork start --all or individual ones with their name, e.g.: pitchfork start redis. If it's already started, nothing happens. You can also have pitchfork automatically start the services when entering the project in your terminal with the shell hook.

Adding a global service that runs on boot

TODO

Shell hook

Pitchfork has an optional shell hook for bash, zsh, and fish that will autostart and autostop services when entering/leaving projects.

To install it, run the command below for your shell:

echo '$(pitchfork activate bash)' >> ~/.bashrc
echo '$(pitchfork activate zsh)' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'pitchfork activate fish | source' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Then when you restart your shell pitchfork will automatically start "autostart" services when entering the directory. Services with "autostop" will stop services when leaving the directory after a bit of a delay if no terminal sessions are still inside the directory.

Here's a pitchfork.toml with this configured:

[services.api]
run = "npm run server:api"
autostart = true
autostop = true

Integration with mise

mise is a project for installing/managing dev tools, managing environment variables, and running tasks. Unlike pitchfork, mise tasks do not run in the background however they offer a lot of functionality you won't find in pitchfork. It's encouraged to define relatively simple services that just call mise run to launch the service as a mise task.

To do so, put the following into pitchfork.toml:

[services.docs]
run = "mise run docs:dev"

And in mise.toml you can define how mise run docs:dev gets setup and behaves:

[env]
NODE_ENV = "development"
[tools]
node = "20"
[tasks."docs:setup"]
run = "npm install"
[tasks."docs:dev"]
run = "node docs/index.js"
depends = ["docs:setup"]