schmonz / macos-user-svscan

Per-user process supervision trees on macOS

macos-user-svscan

What I wanted

Per-user process supervision trees on macOS, managed by daemontools from pkgsrc.

What I tried

Because it works on many other platforms: rc.d-boot from pkgsrc plus daemontools-run from pkgsrc.

What happened

On macOS with FileVault 2, services failed to start with e.g. opening configfile /Users/schmonz/Sites/schmonz.local/conf/lighttpd failed: Operation not permitted.

What I discovered

1. The root svscan is unable to start the user svscan until the user has logged in.
2. The user svscan probably was itself started with insufficient filesystem privileges.

On a system without FileVault enabled, things work as I wanted.

What I did instead

1. Stop trying to use daemontools-run on macOS when FileVault is enabled.
2. Configure launchd to run svscan when I log in.
3. Make sure /opt/pkg/bin/mksh (the shell that these scripts will run under) has Full Disk Access.

What's suboptimal about this

1. If my user isn't logged in, its services don't run.
2. On macOS with FileVault, there might not be anything I can do to make daemontools-run work as I'd want.