Tasksd

Tasksd is a daemon providing JSON-RPC API to spawn processes. As a daemon it detaches execution from the client allowing the spawned process to run even if the client is down.

It is created as a companion for Neovim but it doesn't have anything specific for Neovim. Tasksd can be used as a general purpose terminal multiplexer with an API.

Warning

Tasksd is still under development. There could be bugs, API-breaking changes, and any other sort of instability.

Installation

Requirements:

• Linux or macOS (Windows is not supported)
• Rust 1.97 or newer

For now cargo is the easiest way to install tasksd:

cargo install --git https://github.com/kuznetsss/tasksd

Usage

Only one parameter - unix socket path is required to start tasksd, e.g.:

tasksd --unix-socket-path /tmp/tasksd_socket

Once tasksd is started it will listen for unix socket connections. See API doc on how to interact with tasksd.

Press Ctrl-C or send SIGINT to start graceful shutdown (shutting down all the running tasks before exiting tasksd itself). Second Ctrl-C (or SIGINT) will force tasksd to exit immediately.

Use --help flag to see all the available options.

Features

• tasksd is a daemon - tasks keep running after client disconnects
• (Not implemented yet) PTY is allocated for each task - spawned command sees a real terminal
• output capture - each task output is captured into a ring buffer (by default tasksd keeps last 10 000 lines)
• streaming JSON-RPC API - clients subscribe to live output and exit notifications over a unix socket
• list of tasks - clients can get a list of running or recently finished processes

JSON-RPC API

API is documented in docs/API.md.

Why it exists

A few reasons:

• I was curious to try applying the idea of LSP to task running
• I didn't like any existing Neovim code runners and I wanted to shift as much logic as possible from Lua to Rust

Roadmap

0.3.0 or later:

• Switch output stream to Vec
• Implement different task type PtyTask: - It should render screen from stream of bytes from pty using (libghostty-vt or vt100) - Share screen state via watch channel - Each subscriber calculates diff and sends it to the client
• For piped task reading should be similar to pty_reader: after child process finished drain buffers until got blocking and exit. This will prevent tasksd from hanging on detached grand child processes but it will stop capturing detached process' output
• Separate stdout and stderr in output notifications and in OutputBuffer
• Use thiserror crate
• Tasks chains
• Limit log file size
• Support graceful shutdown by SIGTERM
• Add a parameter to adjust RecentFinishedTasks size

Future ideas:

• Add suggestion module (history, runnables, tasks.json)
• Output search/filter
• TCP sockets support

Acknowledgments

• pty-process crate for an example of how to open ptys using rustix