ZPM - Zig Process Manager

A lightweight process supervisor and daemon written in Zig for managing and monitoring multiple child processes.

Educational Project: This is a learning project exploring systems programming concepts in Zig including process management, IPC, and concurrent programming.

What is ZPM?

ZPM is a process supervisor similar to Supervisor or PM2. It runs as a daemon, managing child processes and automatically restarting them if they crash.

Features

• Auto-restart crashed processes (up to 5 attempts)
• Process logging (stdout/stderr to separate files)
• CLI interface: start, stop, status, logs
• Unix socket IPC communication
• Thread-safe concurrent process management

Prerequisites

• Zig 0.16.0-dev.624 or higher

Configuration

Create a config.toml file:

version = "0.1.0"

[[processes]]
name = "web-server"
command = "python3"
args = ["-m", "http.server", "8080"]
type = "web"

Usage

# Start daemon
./zig-out/bin/zpm start --config config.toml --foreground

# Check status
./zig-out/bin/zpm status

# Stop daemon
./zig-out/bin/zpm stop

# View logs
tail -f child0.stdout.log

How It Works

• Multi-threaded: Main thread + IPC server + supervisor thread per process
• Auto-restart: Supervisor monitors each process, restarts on crash (max 5 attempts, 2s delay)
• IPC: Unix socket at /tmp/zpm.sock for CLI communication
• Logging: Separate stdout/stderr log files per process

Project Structure

src/
├── main.zig       # CLI entry point
├── supervisor.zig # Process monitoring & restart
├── state.zig      # Thread-safe state management
├── daemon.zig     # Daemonization & PID handling
├── config.zig     # TOML config parsing
└── ipc.zig        # Unix socket IPC server

Author

Omar Sabra (the-sabra)