proctide

Run every process in your Procfile together, in one terminal. Each output line is prefixed with a colored process name so you can tell web from worker from css at a glance — and a single Ctrl-C takes the whole lot down cleanly.

Zero dependencies. No Ruby. No tmux. Runs on Node or Python.

npx proctide

web    | listening on http://localhost:3000
worker | polling jobs queue…
css    | rebuilt app.css in 42ms
web    | GET /  200  11ms
worker | processed job #1841
^C
proctide: SIGINT received, shutting down…
web    | exited (signal SIGTERM)
worker | exited (signal SIGTERM)
css    | exited (signal SIGTERM)

Why another Procfile runner?

foreman is the classic, but it's a Ruby gem — one more runtime to install on a Node/Python box. overmind is great but needs tmux. concurrently is excellent and mature — but it's an npm dependency, and you spell your processes out on the command line instead of in a checked-in Procfile.

proctide is the small middle ground: a real Procfile, prefixed interleaved output, clean shutdown — and nothing to install but the tool itself, on whichever of Node or Python you already have.

Install

npx proctide               # no install, run on demand
npm i -g proctide          # or install the `proctide` command globally

There's an identical Python build too: pipx run proctide / pip install proctide (see proctide-py). Both ports parse the same Procfile and print the same prefix format — their pure cores are tested against the same vectors.

The Procfile

One process per line, name: command. Blank lines and # comments are ignored. The command runs through your shell, so pipes, &&, env vars, and globs all work.

# Procfile
web:    node server.js
worker: node worker.js
css:    npx tailwindcss -i app.css -o public/app.css --watch

proctide                 # runs ./Procfile
proctide -f Procfile.dev # or point somewhere else

Usage

proctide [options]

| Option | Description | | --- | --- | | -f, --file <path> | Procfile to read (default: ./Procfile). | | --no-color | Disable the colored name prefixes (e.g. when piping to a file). | | -h, --help | Show help. | | -v, --version | Print version. |

Behavior

• Concurrent. Every process starts at once; their stdout and stderr are merged into one stream, each line tagged name | …. The name column is padded to the longest process name so the | separators line up.
• Clean shutdown. Ctrl-C (SIGINT) — or SIGTERM — forwards SIGTERM to every child, waits briefly, then exits. A child that ignores SIGTERM gets SIGKILL as a backstop.
• One dies, all stop. If any process exits on its own, the rest are shut down too — that's the foreman/overmind contract for a dev stack.
• Honest exit code. proctide exits non-zero if any child exited non-zero, so it behaves in CI and Makefiles.

Design notes

• A pure core, an IO shell. parseProcfile, colorFor, and prefixLine are pure functions — no spawn, no clock, no signals — which is what lets the Node and Python ports be proven identical against one shared vector table. The spawning/streaming/signal-forwarding lives in a separate runner module and is covered by an integration smoke test instead (live output is nondeterministic).
• Prefixes align by construction. The name is padded to width before any ANSI color is applied, so the escape codes never throw off the columns.
• Zero dependencies. Node uses child_process.spawn + readline; Python uses subprocess.Popen + one reader thread per process behind a shared lock so prefixed lines never interleave mid-line.

License

MIT