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Lynx

Quickstart

This page walks you from zero to a supervised, log-captured, auto- restarting service in three commands.

Assumes Lynx is already installed and the daemon is running (systemctl is-active lynxd or pgrep lynxd).

1. Start something

Section titled “1. Start something”

Pick any long-running command. This example uses Node, but it could just as easily be python, go run, bun dev, or a compiled binary.

Terminal window
lynxpm start "node server.js" --name api --namespace prod --restart always

What the flags mean:

  • --name api — the label you’ll refer to it by.
  • --namespace prod — groups this process with every other prod:* app for bulk operations.
  • --restart always — restart on any exit. Other policies: never, on-failure.

After a successful start, Lynx prints the current process table with the new row marked ▸:

✓ Started api
  ID:     019dbd…
  PID:    2336607
  Status: running


┌──────────┬──────┬──────────┬────────┬─────────┐
│ id       │ name │ namespace│ status │ pid     │
├──────────┼──────┼──────────┼────────┼─────────┤
│ ▸ 019dbd │ api  │ prod     │ running│ 2336607 │
└──────────┴──────┴──────────┴────────┴─────────┘

2. Inspect

Section titled “2. Inspect”
Terminal window
lynxpm list              # full table
lynxpm show api          # detail view for one process
lynxpm logs api --follow # live stdout/stderr

3. Operate on the whole tier

Section titled “3. Operate on the whole tier”

Every lifecycle command accepts a namespace selector, so you never need xargs loops:

Terminal window
lynxpm restart --namespace prod   # roll every prod:* app
lynxpm stop    'prod:*'           # halt the tier (quote the glob)
lynxpm delete  --namespace old --purge

From here

Section titled “From here”