shepherd ☆

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Description:
Service manager that looks after the herd of system services

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: System utilities

Tags: service-manager init-system gnu systemd-alternative scheme

Install: brew install shepherd

About:
Shepherd is the GNU service manager, responsible for starting and stopping system services and daemons. It provides a robust framework for defining services with dependencies and ensures they are properly managed throughout the system lifecycle. Unlike traditional init scripts, Shepherd offers a programmatic interface for service configuration and control.

Key Features:

Service dependency management
Programmatic configuration using Scheme
Process supervision and automatic restarts
Hot-reloading of service configurations

Use Cases:

Managing system daemons on GNU/Linux distributions
Initializing and controlling container services
Replacing traditional init systems in custom environments

Alternatives:

systemd – Systemd is a feature-rich suite including logging and networking, while Shepherd is a minimalist, Scheme-based alternative focused solely on service management.
runit – Runit uses simple shell scripts for service supervision, whereas Shepherd offers a more expressive, Lisp-based configuration language.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 15, 2025 10:08am		0	VERSION_BUMP	8886eca5
Jan 16, 2025 1:45pm		0	VERSION_BUMP	3104eedf