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systemfd

systemfd is the 1% of systemd that's useful for development. It's a tiny process that opens a bunch of sockets and passes them to another process so that that process can then restart itself without dropping connections. For that it uses the systemd socket passing protocol (LISTEN_FDS + LISTEN_PID) environment variables on macOS and Linux and a custom protocol on Windows. Both are supported by the listenfd crate.

Teaser when combined with cargo-watch you can get automatically reloading development servers:

$ systemfd --no-pid -s http::5000 -- cargo watch -x run

The --no-pid flag disables passing the LISTEN_PID variable on unix (it has no effect on Windows). This makes listenfd skip the pid check which would fail with cargo watch otherwise. To see how to implement a server ready for systemfd see below.

Installation

You can install a precompiled version of systemfd with curl to bash:

curl -sSfL https://github.com/mitsuhiko/systemfd/releases/latest/download/systemfd-installer.sh | sh

On windows you can use powershell to install it:

powershell -c "irm https://github.com/mitsuhiko/systemfd/releases/latest/download/systemfd-installer.ps1 | iex"

Alternatively you can get systemfd by installing it with cargo:

cargo install systemfd

Usage

systemfd creates one or more sockets as specified on the command line and then invokes another application. Each time you pass the -s (or --socket) parameter a new socket is created. The value for the parameter is a socket specification in the format [TYPE::]VALUE where TYPE defaults to tcp or unix depending on the value. The following types exist:

tcp: creates a tcp listener
http: creates a tcp listener for http usage (prints a http url in the info output)
https: creates a tcp listener for https usage (prints a https url in the info output)
unix: creates a unix listener socket
udp: creates a udp socket

VALUE depends on the socket type. The following formats are supported:

<port>: an integer port value, assumes 127.0.0.1 as host
<host>:<port>: binds to a specific network interface and port
<unix-path>: requests a specific unix socket

Examples

$ systemfd -s http::5000 -- my-server-executable
$ systemfd -s http::5000 -s https::5443 -- my-server-executable
$ systemfd -s 5000 -- my-server-executable
$ systemfd -s udp::1567 -- my-game-server-executable

When systemfd starts it will print out the socket it created. This can be disabled by passing -q. Additionally if a port is set to 0 a random port is picked.

Windows Protocol

On Windows, passing of sockets is significantly more complex than on Unix. To achieve this, this utility implements a custom socket passing system that is also implemented by the listenfd crate. When the sockets are created, an additional local RPC server is spawned that gives out duplicates of the sockets to other processes. The RPC server uses TCP and is communicated to the child with the SYSTEMFD_SOCKET_SERVER environment variable. The RPC calls themselves are protected with a SYSTEMFD_SOCKET_SECRET secret key.

The only understood command is SECRET|PID with secret and the processes' PID inserted. The server replies with N WSAPROTOCOL_INFOW structures. The client is expected to count the number of bytes and act accordingly.