Procman is a tool for managing many processes distributed over one or more computers. There are several ways to use procman:

1. Sheriff / Deputy GUI mode

In this mode, every workstation runs a "deputy" process:

procman-deputy

One workstation runs a "sheriff" process, which provides a GUI to command and communicate with the deputies:

procman-sheriff

Using the GUI, you can:

• create/edit/remove processes
• start/stop/restart processes
• aggregate processes together into logical groups (e.g., "Planning")
• view the console output of each process
• save and load process configuration files
• view process statistics (memory, CPU usage)

For the special case where you only want to run processes on the local computer, the sheriff can act as its own deputy. To operate in lone ranger mode, run

procman-sheriff --lone-ranger

2. C++ API

Procman also provides a C++ API for spawning and managing child processes, comparable to the Python subprocess module.

• LCM
• Python
• PyGTK (procman-sheriff is written in Python with PyGTK)

Currently only tested on GNU/Linux. Some stuff will definitely only work on Linux (e.g., the process memory, CPU statistics).

After cloning procman, create and move a build directory

mkdir build
cd build

Now run cmake (optionally use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to change the local install directory from /usr/local to a different directory):

cmake ..
make

Documentation is built with Doxygen.

cd doc
doxygen