goetia

• Installation & Setup
• Tutorials
• Contribute
• Requesting a service

What is it?

goetia is a policy for s6 and s6-rc. That is, it uses the tools that s6, s6-rc, POSIX utilities and some Kernel specific utilites provide, to form the basis of a UNIX like operating system, in the form of supervision trees.

• goetia is a solution to init, the first process started by the Kernel upon boot.
• goetia based init then starts a system supervision tree, which is a tool to orderly start, stop and monitor other processes.
• This system supervision tree starts services and may start further user supervision trees, both managed by s6 and s6-rc.
• All scripts are written in the execline language: rationale for that, reference and introduction as well as a 101 for execline.

As such, goetia is of interest for distribution maintainers and powerusers as a starting point to use s6 and s6-rc for init, supervision and service management.

Why does it exist?

s6 and s6-rc implement only mechanism, no policy. As such they can be used in many different ways. I spent a lot of time trying to find effective ways to use s6 and s6-rc in server and desktop usecases. goetia is the attempt to share the results.

Thus, the documentation and tutorials make up an as big or even bigger part of goetia than the software that it provides. This, because much of the services and configuration used on most machines will need to be written by the system administrator.

Why choose s6, s6-rc and goetia?

goetia, like s6 and s6-rc:

• closely follows the KISS principle,
• closely follows the UNIX philosophy: one tool, one job,
• has a very small code base,
• uses very little resources,
• can make use of powerful machines using parallelization,
• is thoroughly documented.

Where to start?

If you are new to init systems, supervision and service management, I recommend reading the following first:

• Read about init.
• Read the introduction on supervision trees.
• Read and understand the documentation of s6, especially the high-level overview and about scan directories as well as service directories.
• Read and understand the documentation of s6-rc, especially the high-level overview and about the source format as well as the rationale.
• Read about and understand installation directories, configuration directories, the runtime directory and the log directory.

Then, continue with the installation & setup, this will yield a minimal s6/s6-rc powered system.

From this point on everything is highly dependend on the use case of the machine running goetia. The tutorials explain how to do many commonly required things like mounting drives.