Background daemons

Some services run in the background: they fork into a daemon, re-exec into detached workers, or are controlled through start and stop commands rather than staying in the foreground. devhost cannot supervise those through a command. Give it the commands instead with daemon mode.

Configure a daemon

[services.mailpit]
port = 8025
host = "mail.hello.localhost"
health = { http = "http://127.0.0.1:8025/api/v1/info" }

[services.mailpit.lifecycle]
mode = "daemon"
start = ["./scripts/mailpit-devctl", "start"]
status = ["./scripts/mailpit-devctl", "status"]
stop = ["./scripts/mailpit-devctl", "stop"]

When the stack starts, devhost runs status first. If it exits 0, the daemon is already running and devhost skips start; otherwise it runs start. Either way, devhost then waits for the health check and adds the routes. On shutdown and on every restart it runs stop.

Rules

• start and stop are required; status is optional.
• A daemon service has no top-level command, and stays managed (no managed = false).
• It needs a fixed port or an explicit health check: port = "auto" and health.process are not allowed, because devhost owns no long-lived process for it.
• Its recovery page reports the health check, not a process exit.