Dev Server

Background daemon management for long-running services — daemons.json fields and crash recovery.

Dev Servers (daemons) manage long-running background processes — development servers, watchers, local services. Nebflow starts them, keeps them alive, and surfaces their status in the client.

Configuration lives in ~/.nebflow/daemons.json:

{
  "daemons": [
    {
      "id": "website-dev",
      "name": "Website Dev",
      "command": "npm run dev",
      "cwd": "~/projects/nebflow-website",
      "env": { "NODE_ENV": "development" },
      "autoStart": true,
      "restartOnExit": true,
      "port": 3000
    }
  ]
}

Configuration Fields

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
`id`	string	Yes	—	Unique daemon id
`name`	string	Yes	—	Display name in the client UI
`command`	string \| string[]	Yes	—	Command to run (a plain string is split on whitespace)
`cwd`	string	No	—	Working directory
`env`	map	No	`{}`	Extra environment variables
`autoStart`	bool	No	false	Start when Nebflow starts
`restartOnExit`	bool	No	false	Restart when the process exits
`port`	int	No	—	Port the service listens on (enables health checks and open-in-browser)

Crash Recovery

All optional and backward compatible — a minimal id/name/command entry gets sensible defaults:

Field	Default	Description
`restartBackoffSec`	2	Delay before the first auto-restart; doubles per attempt, capped at 60s
`restartMaxAttempts`	5	Give up after this many consecutive crash restarts (crash-loop protection)
`restartStableWindowSec`	60	A run longer than this resets the consecutive-crash counter — a daemon that crashes once a day is never falsely exhausted
`healthCheckSec`	15	Periodically TCP-probes `port`; a live process with a closed port is treated as crashed. `0` disables the active health check (only process-exit detection remains)

Status

A daemon reports one of four states — stopped, running, crashed, starting — plus runtime details: pid, start time, exit code, and recent output. When a port is configured, an independent reachability probe reports whether the port accepts TCP connections, so an externally-started server (not managed by Nebflow) still shows as reachable.

Managing Daemons

The client settings panel has a Dev Servers (开发服务器) section where you can add entries and start/stop daemons without editing the JSON by hand.