When my company started, we used tmux in PROD as a process supervisor. We had tons of lines like:

    while true; do ./runserver; sleep 10; done

in a shell script that would start a new server with one window per process. It got called from /etc/rc.local on boot IIRC.

Deploys meant pulling the new code on the server (or maybe just editing it in vim right there), then just Ctrl-C in every terminal (or when I got lazier, `killall runserver`).

This was back in 2010 or so... I have professionally come a long way in the intervening decade, and no longer have any PROD services running in tmux panes, but I definitely learned to love that tool.

I've done things similar and do it for quick and dirty. Currently I have something like that on a RPi but instead of

    while true;

I have,

    while [[ ! -f "$DIRECTORY"/backup_exit.stop ]]; do
        sleep 3600 # sleep an hour
        time /home/ubuntu/.pyenv/versions/backup/bin/python main.py
    done

Whenever I want the process to stop, `touch backup_exit.stop` . This waits until the run finishes and exists on the next loop.

Anyway, that is saved to a 'backup.sh'

Then I have also,

    #!/bin/bash
    session="test"
    backup="/path/to/backup.sh" 
    
    #create detached session named test
    tmux new-session -d -s ${session}
    # Create windows
    tmux rename-window -t :0 'backup' #rename the first one
    tmux new-window -n 'htop'
    # Run processes
    tmux send-keys -t 'backup' "$backup" ENTER
    tmux send-keys -t 'htop' 'htop' ENTER
    
    

And this is run automatically on @reboot via cron.

This is super interesting! Wouldn’t nohup do the same thing though?

+1 to tmux, or even screen if you can't get tmux installed.

It also protects against flaky network connections and accidentally closing the local terminal emulator.

tmux is legitimately one of my most useful tools in day to day work.