Running as a service

For development, you don't need to set anything up: the daemon starts automatically when you need it.

To keep projects running across reboots, or on a small server, run the daemon under your system's service manager with watchd daemon, which runs it in the foreground.

systemd (Linux)

Create a user service. No root is needed, and apps run as you:

# ~/.config/systemd/user/watchd.service
[Unit]
Description=watchd process supervisor

[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/watchd daemon
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Adjust the ExecStart path to wherever command -v watchd says watchd is installed, then:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now watchd
loginctl enable-linger "$USER"     # keep it running when you're logged out

Check it with systemctl --user status watchd, or with journalctl --user -u watchd, which shows the daemon's log.

Starting projects with the service

Projects aren't remembered across daemon restarts yet, so start them after the daemon is up. Add one ExecStartPost= line per project:

[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/watchd daemon
ExecStartPost=%h/.local/bin/watchd up -c %h/work/shop/watchd.lua
ExecStartPost=%h/.local/bin/watchd up -c %h/work/blog/watchd.lua
Restart=on-failure

The environment under systemd

Apps get the environment of whoever runs watchd up. Under systemd, that's the service's environment, which has a minimal PATH. Set what your apps need in the unit (Environment=PATH=...) or in the project's env/env_file.

launchd (macOS)

<!-- ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.omar0ali.watchd.plist -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.github.omar0ali.watchd</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/usr/local/bin/watchd</string>
    <string>daemon</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
  <key>KeepAlive</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.github.omar0ali.watchd.plist

Then run watchd up in your projects, or from a login script.