One of the things I’ve always found most inspiring about open source is its developers’ unwavering passion for the cause. It’s a defining trait of the movement—something you don’t find in the halls of corporate offices or the loud marketing campaigns.
Just when it seems like an open-source project has faded into oblivion, just like that, it flares up again with full force. That’s exactly what’s happening with the star of this story: the GNU Shepherd project.
Introduced back in 2003 under its former name, GNU dmd, Shepherd has been around for 21 years as a service management daemon. It was among the first init systems to move away from the traditional System V style.
It’s a lightweight alternative, written in GNU Guile, to more monolithic service managers like systemd, which “herds” services by tracking their state and dependencies while providing simple yet effective tools for starting, stopping, and restarting them.
With a focus on simplicity and customization, Shepherd is well-suited and primarily used for the GNU Guix ecosystem.
And today, after over two decades of development, Shepherd has finally reached the coveted 1.0 milestone. This landmark release introduces several enhancements that make it more powerful than ever:
- Transient Services: Quickly run commands in the background with a transient service, similar to
systemd-run. - Timed Services: Schedule commands or Scheme code to run periodically, replacing older tools like
atandcron. - Improved Service Insights:
herd statusnow provides detailed information about services, including PIDs, commands, and log messages. - Integrated Logging: A new system log service eliminates the need for external syslog daemons, enabling seamless integration with The Shepherd’s ecosystem.
- Log Rotation: Built-in support for rotating, compressing, and cleaning up log files ensures efficient log management without additional configuration.
Additionally, the deprecated GOOPS interface has been removed, and new commands like reboot --kexec allow for direct kernel reboots.
To mark this historic release, a brand-new logo is now available under a Creative Commons license, and the project has launched a dedicated website to showcase its features.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that the Shepherd journey doesn’t stop at v1.0. Developers are already eyeing future enhancements, including support for dynamically reconfigurable services, Linux cgroups integration, and more. For more insights, see the official announcement.
