s6-frontend

What is it ?

s6-frontend is still in development.

s6-frontend is a frontend to the s6 ecosystem. It is made of several parts:

A set of user-friendly commands, making it easier to manage a s6-based system for people who are used to other tools.
An independent configuration file format, and tools that automatically analyze a configuration written in that format and transform it into a configuration suitable for booting a system via s6, s6-linux-init and s6-rc. This should help users who are not familiar with s6 and s6-rc directory-based configuration but are used to, for instance, systemd unit files.
A prepackaged set of configuration files, implementing policy, suitable for booting a large majority of Linux-based systems. This should help distributions that want to switch to s6 but do not want to rewrite all their init scripts in yet another format.

These parts are all independent from one another. But when put all together, they implement a powerful, fast, turnkey init system that is usable on any distribution.

Quickstart and FAQ

Installation

Requirements

A Linux-based system with a standard C development environment
GNU make, version 3.81 or later
skalibs version 2.14.5.1 or later
execline version 2.9.8.1 or later
s6 version 2.14.0.0 or later
s6-rc version 0.6.0.0 or later
Optional: nsss version 0.2.1.1 or later
Optional: s6-linux-init version 1.2.0.0 or later
Optional: util-linux version 2.41.2 or later

All the skaware packages are build-time dependencies as well as run-time dependencies.
- skalibs is only a run-time dependency if you link the binaries against the shared version of the skarnet library.
util-linux is a run-time dependency only.

Licensing

s6-frontend is free software. It is available under the ISC license.

Download

The current released version of s6-frontend is 0.0.1.0. (unavailable while in development) You can access its checksum here.
Alternatively, you can checkout a copy of the s6-frontend git repository:
```
 git clone git://git.skarnet.org/s6-frontend 
```
There's also a GitHub mirror, or a SourceHut mirror of the s6-frontend git repository.

Compilation

See the enclosed INSTALL file for installation details.

Upgrade notes

This page lists the differences to be aware of between the previous versions of s6-frontend and the current one.

Reference

Commands

All these commands exit 111 if they encounter a temporary error, and 100 if they encounter a permanent error - such as a misuse.

Related resources

s6-frontend is discussed on the supervision mailing-list.
There is a #s6 IRC channel on OFTC. Sometimes people are there and even answer questions.