Kartikeya
Skanda · Murugan — the six-faced commander of the divine armies, born to lead the devas. The engine that marshals and runs a fleet's tasks. Colloquially: Kart.
A standalone, host-agnostic task queue + sandboxed worker. Submit shell (or, optionally, LLM-workflow) tasks to a queue; a worker claims them and runs each in a bubblewrap sandbox with an explicit mount/credential/network policy.
Kartikeya is the execution engine extracted from the Willow fleet
(willow-2.0/core/kart_* — historical path) and made to stand on its own — no fleet, no specific
host, no required database server.
Status
Extracted and published. The sandbox/worker/execute core is fully landed
(sandbox.py, worker.py, execute.py, queue.py), tested, and released on
PyPI as kartikeya (0.0.9) — pip install kartikeya, or pip install willow-mcp, which floors it at >=0.0.9,<1.0.0. The cap is a real
compatibility range rather than decoration: bump-minor-pre-major is false
here, so a breaking change cuts 1.0.0 instead of hiding in a minor. The staged lift in docs/DESIGN.md is done
through stage 4; stage 5 (legacy fleet monolith deleting its core/kart_* copy) is
tracked in willow-mcp#111.
Design goals
- Host-agnostic. The only coupling — "where do tasks live" — is a small
TaskQueueinterface a host implements. Kartikeya owns the sandbox, worker loop, lanes, and command scan; the host owns storage and file roots. - Zero-infra by default. Ships a reference
SqliteTaskQueue, sopip install kartikeyacan execute tasks with no Postgres and no fleet. - Backend-swappable. SQLite (bundled), Postgres, or a custom backend behind the same interface.
- Sandboxed and network-gated. Tasks run network-isolated unless the stored
task text carries a
# allow_netdirective; credentials reach only network- enabled tasks. (Who is allowed to write that directive is the host's call — see the security note indocs/DESIGN.md.)
Install
pip install kartikeya # base: shell tasks, SQLite backend
pip install "kartikeya[postgres]" # + Postgres backend helpers
pip install "kartikeya[llm]" # + LLM-workflow task type
Quickstart
Resource caps (memory + PID limits) prefer a delegated cgroup parent. On a fresh install, run once:
kartikeya setup-cgroup # installs ~/.config/systemd/user/kart.slice
kartikeya cgroup-status # should print ready: /sys/fs/cgroup/...
systemd worker (operative): a shell profile export does not reach a
user-service kart worker. After setup-cgroup succeeds, wire the parent into the
worker environment and restart:
systemctl --user set-environment KART_CGROUP_PARENT=/sys/fs/cgroup/.../kart.slice
systemctl --user restart <your-kart-worker-unit>
(Or set Environment=KART_CGROUP_PARENT=... in a drop-in for the worker unit.)
The export line printed by setup-cgroup is for CLI / interactive runs
only. Without a delegated parent, Kart falls back to task-scoped prlimit/ulimit inside the
sandbox (PID cap by default; virtual-memory cap only with KART_RLIMIT_USE_AS=1).
WILLOW_KART_NO_RLIMIT=1 disables caps entirely (escape hatch only).
Coming with stage 2 — once the worker core lands, this section documents
kartikeya worker end to end (submit → worker runs → poll).
License
MIT © Sean Campbell
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
Release files for kartikeya 0.0.12
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