immortal.run

What It Is

immortal is a cross-platform process manager for *nix systems, inspired by daemontools and runit but extended with practical features. Its core purpose is to keep services “alive forever”: even if a process crashes or the server reboots, it can automatically bring the service back up. Compared with traditional init or upstart scripts, it is particularly optimized for zero-downtime deployments (such as Unicorn/Gunicorn), self-daemonizing processes (such as Nginx), and distributed logging scenarios.

Core Dimensions

• Features and Use Cases: immortal provides three core components: immortal for starting and monitoring services, immortaldir for scanning directories and managing services in bulk, and immortalctl for controlling service status. It supports following a PID via the -f flag, making it a strong fit for applications that fork child processes on their own. Through the run.yml configuration file, developers can finely control log rotation (size, count, and time), environment variables, startup wait times, and service dependencies.
• API/SDK and Integration: immortal exposes a Unix Socket interface and returns process status data in JSON format. This means its control interface can be accessed via curl, or even exposed as an HTTP API through Nginx for remote automation. In terms of ecosystem integration, it supports FreeBSD’s rc.conf and Linux Systemd, and works smoothly with operations tools such as Ansible and Filebeat.
• Supported Languages/Frameworks: As a system-level tool, it is language-agnostic, though the official examples focus on integration with the Ruby ecosystem and various message queue clients.
• Documentation Quality: The documentation includes basic man pages and configuration examples, covering scenarios from launching a single process to managing multiple workers in parallel. However, the content is somewhat fragmented and may not be very beginner-friendly.

Pricing, Pros, and Cons

No pricing information is mentioned in the source material. Given that it provides a Github link and deb packages, it appears to be a free and open-source tool.
Pros: Compatible with daemontools/runit scripts; excellent support for self-daemonizing processes and zero-downtime deployments; JSON API makes it easy to integrate into automated operations workflows; flexible log management.
Cons: Limited to *nix environments; requires users to have some background in system service management; documentation could be more structured.

Who It’s For

immortal is suitable for backend developers and DevOps engineers who need a unified process management solution across mixed *nix environments, especially teams dealing with self-daemonizing processes or zero-downtime deployment scenarios that traditional Supervisor struggles to handle.

Access from China

As a local system-level tool, its core functionality is not affected by network restrictions. However, access to its official domain, immortal.run, is unknown, so a proxy may be needed to view the documentation. There are no payment-related restrictions, as it is free and open source. Domestic alternatives in China include Supervisor or simply using Systemd directly.