spawn

Overview ¶

Spawn is a launcher with a web dashboard that runs commands with arguments listed in the textproto config.pbtxt file.

Install spawn standalone with:

go install ask.systems/daemon/spawn@latest

You can also use spawn as a subcommand of the combined ask.systems/daemon binary.

Spawn is run with root permissions so that it can open privileged files and ports for child servers, place child servers in a chroot, and set the user to run them as. This means we can avoid running any servers as root.

The dashboard provides a convenient way to restart servers and read the logs in real time.

Example config.pbtxt: (here showing two different repeated field styles)

command {
	binary: "portal"
	user: "www"
	ports: [80, 443]
	files: [
		"/etc/letsencrypt/live/ask.systems/fullchain.pem",
		"/etc/letsencrypt/live/ask.systems/privkey.pem"
	]
	auto_tls_certs: true
	args: [
		"-http_port=-3",
		"-https_port=-4",
		"-tls_cert=5",
		"-tls_key=6",
		"-auto_tls_certs",
		"-cert_challenge_webroot=/cert-challenge/"
	]
}
# Serve the favicon.ico for the URL.
# Appears on the dashboard and in logs as host-favicon.
command {
	binary: "host"
	user: "www"
	name: "favicon"

	args: "-portal_token=YOUR TOKEN HERE"
	args: "-web_root=/"
	args: "-url_path=/favicon.ico"
}