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 (pure Python stdlib). No Ruby. No tmux.

pipx run 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 Python or Node you already have.

Install

pipx run proctide          # no install, run on demand
pip install proctide       # or install the `proctide` command

There's an identical Node build too: npx proctide / npm i -g proctide (see proctide). 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:    python server.py
worker: python worker.py
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]

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's process group, 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. parse_procfile, color_for, and prefix_line are pure functions — no spawn, no clock, no signals — which is what lets the Python and Node 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. Python uses subprocess.Popen + one reader thread per process behind a shared lock so prefixed lines never interleave mid-line; Node uses child_process.spawn + readline.

License

MIT