relaunchd: a portable clone of launchd

Mark Heily mark at heily.com
Mon Nov 16 00:55:21 UTC 2015


I've written a clone of the launchd framework found in Mac OS X [1].
It's called "relaunchd" and I would like to some help improving it and
getting it added to the FreeBSD ports tree [2].

Here's the source code:

    https://github.com/mheily/relaunchd

One of the coolest things I've been able to do with it is to use
socket activation to launch an unmodified version of Apache inside of
a jail, pass it a socket descriptor bound to port 80 from the primary
network interface outside of the jail, and have it "just work" and
start serving web content using the pre-existing socket descriptor.
This eliminates the need to setup a cumbersome NAT and port forwarding
mechanism for each jail [3].

This is a completely separate line of development from the work that
the NextBSD folks are doing to port the published Apple source code
for launchd and all of it's dependencies.

I'd be happy to answer questions about relaunchd, and welcome
contributions from anyone who wants to help make launchd on FreeBSD a
reality.

Regards,

 - Mark

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
[2] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204240
[3] Example: http://kbeezie.com/freebsd-jail-single-ip/


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