Hexus

Hexus is a process manager built using .NET 10 designed to work on Linux and Windows seamlessly while being nice and simple to use

Features

• Performant
• Supports sending CTRL + C (SIGINT) signals on both Linux and Windows
• All the logs are in a single place ready to be read with timestamps and type of output
• Keeps track of the complete usage of resources of an application, including child processes
• Has a nice and simple CLI to use to manage all your applications
• Can autogenerate the startup scripts for you to customize based on your needs for Windows (Windows Task Scheduler) and Linux (systemd)
• Exposes both socket and (optional) HTTP port for the requests to the daemon, under windows sockets are supported

Installation

Download the binary from the latest CI release below or compile it using the .NET 10 SDK.

OS	Self-contained	Runtime dependent
Windows amd64	Latest Release | CI Build	Latest Release | CI Build
Linux amd64	Latest Release | CI Build	Latest Release | CI build
Windows arm64	Latest Release | CI Build	Latest Release | CI Build
Linux arm64	Latest Release | CI Build	Latest Release | CI Build

Compilation

If you want to compile the binary for yourself you need to install:

• .NET 10 SDK
• ASP.NET Core, usually bundled with the SDK

To create a release build to use run the following command after have cloned the repo and being in the top directory

dotnet publish Hexus

Optionally you can add --self-contained to remove the need for the .NET Runtime to be installed or with the --runtime flag to specify a target runtime like linux-arm64 or win-x64

Usage

Start the daemon

To start the daemon run hexusd. To stop the daemon you can terminate the process with CTRL-C or a signal or you can use the hexus daemon stop command.

If you want to add hexusd to the startup you can use the hexus startup command. It will detect what platform you are on and give you a powershell script for the windows task scheduler when run under windows or a systemd unit service file when running under Linux to quickly set up the startup process.

Tip

When the command of hexus startup is redirected it won't output the decorations around the text to be easier to use the script/service that it creates

Note

Hexus only supports Windows task scheduler and systemd unit services as startup scripts so using another platform will require you to set it up manually.

New application

To create a new application you can use the new command or create the appName.toml file in the applications/ directory in the hexus config directory.

hexus new <name> <exe> [... <args>] [<flags>]

After you create the application you will be asked if you want to open the configuration in the editor: not all configurations are available as flags to the new command, only the most common are. Additionally if the daemon is running you will be also asked if you want to reload the configuration and load the new app.

For more details on the application toml configuration see the configuration section below.

List applications

To list all the application currently configured you can use the list command

hexus list

The list command will provide some basic information on the application, but you can use the info command with the name of the application to get some more info on it.

Both list and info can work without the daemon, in which case they will read the configuration and not provide any state of the apps. If the daemon hasn't been reloaded and the configuration has changed, both list and info will still output the daemon-provided data when using the daemon.

Get applications logs

To read all the application logs you can use the logs command like in the example:

hexus logs <application name>

Flags

• --lines or -l to specify the number of log lines to fetch from the log file, specify -1 to get all lines
• --no-streaming to disable the streaming of logs to the console while the command is active
• --no-dates to disable the Hexus provided timestamp of the log lines
• --current or -c to show only the logs from the currently running for last execution of the application.
• --after or -a to select logs that have a timestamp after the one provided (does get affected by --timezone)
• --before or -b to select logs that have a timestamp before the one provided (does get affected by --timezone)
• --timezone timezone of the Hexus provided timestamps, should be picked from the system-provided timezones. Defaults to the computer current timezone.

All the flags are available in the help for the command, you can use the --help or -h flag to see it.

Log file

The log file is placed in $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/logs/<app name>.log, see configuration for more details.

If you want to manually parse the log files the format is as follows: [<date>,<type>] <message> where

• date is a date in UTC time using the ISO8601 format
• type is one of STDOUT, STDERR or SYSTEM. SYSTEM only used for Hexus messages like the application start or stop.
• message is the application log.

Start / Stop / Restart

Hexus has a enabled config for application and a state for applications.

An application is enabled is the daemon should start it when the daemon itself starts, an application state is running if the process for the application has been spawned.

To start an application you can use the start <name> command, to stop an application you can use the stop <name>, to restart an application you can use restart <name>.

hexus stop and hexus restart allow for the --force flag to be passed to bypass the CTRL+C signal and wait of up to 30s and simply kill the application immediately.

Delete

You can delete an application with the delete command or manually deleting the application's configuration file.

hexus delete also allow for the --force flag to be passed to bypass the CTRL+C signal and wait of up to 30s and simply kill the application immediately.

Warning

By default, when deleting an application the log file will also be deleted, you can use --keep-logs to keep it.

Edit application

Editing an application with edit will open up an editor for you to edit the configuration directly.

After you save and quit the CLI will ask you if you want to reload to apply the changes.

Reload

If you edit the configuration you can apply the changes with the reload command.

Send input to the application

Hexus also allows sending messages in the application STDIN by using the input <name> <message> command.

You need to specify the application name and the message you want to send to the application.

You can add the --no-new-line (-n) flag to avoid adding the newline at the end.

Hexus will always send the message to the direct child, if the application spawns child-processes you won't be able to write to their STDIN unless the application itself handles that.

Configuration

Hexus configuration is stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hexus.

The socket the daemon exposes is on $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hexus/daemon.sock for Linux and $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/daemon.sock for Windows,

The logs for the daemon in $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/daemon.log and the logs for the applications in $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/logs/<app name>.log

The state for the apps is stored in $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/states/<app name>.state.

These locations can be customized with the XDG_CONFIG_HOME (defaults to ~/.config), XDG_RUNTIME_DIR¹ and XDG_STATE_HOME (defaults to .local/state) environment variables.

On Windows setting the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR will not be ignored and that path will be used instead of using the $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus folder.

The configuration is split in multiple files in the TOML format.

Intervals can be specified with the following format: [<hours>h] [<minutes>m] [<seconds>s]. Example: 5s Byte sizes can be specified with the following format: <size>[unit]B. Example: 5GB

Note

The configuration directory and state directory will have a .dev suffix when run in development. The .dev suffix is enabled if DOTNET_ENVIRONMENT is Development

daemon.toml

This is the configuration for the daemon

Name	Description
unix-socket	Path for the unix socket, used for connecting to the daemon
http-port	Optional http port to expose the daemon
cpu-polling-interval	Interval for polling the CPU usage of applications
memory-polling-interval	Interval for polling the Memory usage of applications for the memory limiter
memory-limit	The default limit in byte size for application memory usage

applications/<name>.toml

This is the configuration for a single application.

Name	Description
exe	Path for the executable of the application
args	Optional arguments for the executable
working-dir	Path for the working directory of the application
enabled	Whatever the application should start when the daemon starts
note	Optional user-defined string. It is printed in the info command
memory-limit	The limit in byte size for application memory usage
env	Optional TOML dictionary for envs

State file

This is the persistant data for an application. This is also a TOML file.

Name	Description
crashed	Indicates if the application has crashed. A crashed app is not restarted at daemon start even if enabled.

Old hexus config (.yaml based config)

Old versions of hexus (< 0.6) used a .yaml file stored at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hexus.yaml.

This format is no longer accepted, however you can use the migrate-config command to update your configuration from the old single-file .yaml based file to the new multi-file .toml configuration.

After updating if you want to preserve the old logs you should move them from $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/applications to $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus/logs

Additionally old versions defaulted to capture the entire env of the shell when hexus new was executed as used that as the env for the new app. This is no longer the case as it polluted application envs with junk/transient environment variables.

PM2 Migration

Hexus allows you to migrate your current pm2 applications saved in the dump.pm2 file. You can use the migrate-pm2 command with, optionally, the --pm2-dump option in case you are not using the default $HOME/.pm2/dump.pm2 file, just remember to run pm2 save before you run the command.

Warning

The only tested version for migration is pm2 5.3.0 using another version might give errors. Migrating apps that are configured as cluster in pm2 will fail and Hexus will skip them as Hexus supports fork_mode only.

Hexus uses names to discriminate on what application the operation should be taken, for this reason if there are name conflicts with existing application Hexus will add the -pm2 suffix. If the name is still used, it will add a -pm2-[num] starting from 2 until the name conflict is solved.

Roadmap

• Add log rotation support

Limitations

• MacOS is not supported as Hexus needs to get the child processes for an application to calculate the correct RAM and CPU usages, and I don't have anything to test how to get them.

License

Hexus is under the MIT license

Footnotes

1. XDG_RUNTIME_DIR does not provide a clear default, however if running on Windows the value "defaults" to $XDG_STATE_HOME/hexus, on Unix systems a hexus-<UID> directory, where <UID> is replaced with the user ID that is running hexus, will be created in the temp directory with the permissions 700 and the current user as the owner according to the XDG basedir specification ↩