Feature request?: unbuffer as a boolean for custom services/processes

[bennyandresen]

Hey there,

thanks for the project. I was looking for having NixOS-like services outside of NixOS and this project had the best documentation to create a custom service.

Sometimes some projects are not happy with whatever process-compose is doing and the pseudo-tty or the lack thereof and the processes fail in weird ways.

What do you think about a convenient ability to toggle the use of unbuffer from the expect package for such services?

unbuffer helped me in devenv when I used tailwindcss and now also in services-flake with my custom service.

this is what I ended up with using my custom service and I can imagine having better UX around that when using process-compose more heavily.

      processes."${name}" = {
        command = pkgs.writeShellApplication {
          name = "unbuffered-datomic";
          runtimeInputs = [ pkgs.expect ];
          text = "exec unbuffer ${startScript}/bin/start-datomic";
        };
        depends_on."${name}-init".condition = "process_completed_successfully";
        availability = {
          restart = "on_failure";
          max_restarts = 2;
        };
      };

EDIT:
The imagined configuration could be

      processes."${name}-init" = { command = setupScript; unbuffer = true; };

[srid]

Have you tried using is_tty?

https://github.com/srid/ema-template/blob/70a2fa6e76a1de8f68e6577ce4e73d9caea50151/flake.nix#L70

[bennyandresen]

Thank you! That's much better than my suggestion and it's already present. :-)

Now the memory usage is also correct and not the one from unbuffer.