My user configuration for Shepherd
Alex Kost
4ce31acd21
Add default directories to the xorg font path
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vor 7 Jahren | |
|---|---|---|
| .dir-locals.el | vor 9 Jahren | |
| .gitignore | vor 9 Jahren | |
| COPYING | vor 8 Jahren | |
| README.org | vor 8 Jahren | |
| init.scm | vor 7 Jahren |
README.org
About
This is my user configuration for Shepherd. I use Shepherd not only to run my user daemons, but also to start X sessions, window managers, various GUI utils and applications.
Shepherd is a great program for managing user services. Previously I used Systemd for this purpose (see my systemd-user-units repository), but Shepherd is a much more convenient tool because you have a whole power of a general-purpose language (Guile) in your hands. It's like comparing Emacs and nano: with Emacs you can program your environment, while with nano… well, you can probably do some text editing in nano, I don't want to hurt nano fans.
My config consists of a single init.scm file which uses some of my
guile modules.
Description
There is nothing interesting with the usual daemons (like gpg-agent or
dbus), except maybe that I have a "target" service daemons that allows
me to control all the daemons at once, like this 1:
herd status daemons
herd stop daemons
X server and friends
GUI services are more interesting. At first, there is a problem: after starting X server, we should wait for some time, and only when it is ready, we can start window manager and other programs on it. Thanks to Jouke Witteveen there is a beautiful solution for this problem: a bash script that runs X server as a daemon. I made a stand-alone package for this Xdaemon script here.
Another obstacle for me was that I wanted to start X server with my
configuration and modules placed in non-standard directories, but Xorg
does not allow this when it is run with elevated rights. Although
recent Xorg versions have some support to be started with non-super-user
rights, I'm not able to use this feature, so the only option I see is to
start X server with sudo. So I configured /etc/sudoers so that
Xdaemon script (installed to an unmodifiable global directory) could be
run with sudo without password.
Now if I run the following command 2:
herd start gui:0
X server is started on DISPLAY :0 and vt7, then some auxiliary services are started (xset, xmodmap, etc.), and finally xterm (as I didn't specify anything after "gui:0").
If I run this:
herd start gui:1 stumpwm emacs
Another X server is started on DISPLAY :1 and vt8, and instead of xterm I got stumpwm and emacs running on this DISPLAY.
Then I can stop services, restart services, start another window manager on a particular display, and do other service managing tasks. Shepherd is not as mature as systemd and is not very well documented, but it is really great!
start/status/… as I have several shell aliases for herd commands that
can be found here.
me to start X server and other things on a free DISPLAY.
- Actually instead of writing =herd start/status/…= I just write
- For more convenience I wrote a wrapper [[https://github.com/alezost/guile-config/blob/master/scripts/gui][guile script]] that allows