deptyr - a super cheap way to spawn tty programs under process supervision

Say you want to run a program that sometimes crashes (hello, rtorrent!) under a process supervisor (hello, daemontools!), but that program uses terminal graphics or other cute things that are great if you're running a thing interactively, but a complete pain if you want reasonable log files. Deptyr can help you!

This tool has two modes: The first mode (-s) allocates a PTY, redirects IO to that PTY and then execs a program, and the other mode (-H or "head") receives that PTY from a unix domain socket and proxies IO to/from the program.

Example usage

In this example, we'll run a de-pty'ed rtorrent under daemontools in freebsd, and spawn a head under a screen.

To spawn the main program, add this run script under the rtorrent service:

#!/bin/sh

exec deptyr -s /tmp/deptyr-rtorrent.socket rtorrent

And to spawn the screen, add this to your /etc/rc.local:

screen -d -m deptyr -H /tmp/deptyr-rtorrent.socket

Etymology & thanks

Deptyr owes a lot (almost all) of its code and its motivation & existence to reptyr by Nelson Elhage. So, you know, I replaced the "r" with a "d".

Pronunciation-wise, you can say it "de-p-t-y-er".