Running as a Service

Astonish runs as a background daemon managed by your operating system's service manager. The daemon serves Studio at http://localhost:9393, handles scheduled flows, channel integrations, and persistent sessions. It starts automatically on boot and restarts on failure.

Installation

The daemon install command registers Astonish with the appropriate service manager for your OS:

astonish daemon install

This creates:

• macOS: A launchd plist at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/dev.astonish.daemon.plist
• Linux: A systemd user unit at ~/.config/systemd/user/astonish.service

Options

Flag	Default	Description
--port	9393	HTTP port for Studio UI

Example with custom port:

astonish daemon install --port 8080

Starting and Stopping

# Start the daemon
astonish daemon start

# Stop the daemon
astonish daemon stop

# Restart the daemon
astonish daemon restart

# Check status
astonish daemon status

Running in Foreground

For debugging, run the daemon in the foreground instead of as a background service:

astonish daemon run

This starts the server in the current terminal session with logs printed to stdout. Press Ctrl+C to stop.

Flag	Default	Description
--port	9393	HTTP port for Studio UI

Controlling Auto-Start

The daemon is configured to start automatically on login by default.

macOS (launchd)

The plist includes RunAtLoad: true. To manually control:

# Disable auto-start
launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/dev.astonish.daemon.plist

# Re-enable
launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/dev.astonish.daemon.plist

Linux (systemd)

The unit is enabled via systemctl --user. To manually control:

# Disable auto-start
systemctl --user disable astonish

# Re-enable
systemctl --user enable astonish

Viewing Logs

# Show recent logs (default: last 50 lines)
astonish daemon logs

# Follow live logs
astonish daemon logs -f

# Show last 100 lines
astonish daemon logs -n 100

OS-level log access

# macOS: view via system log
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "dev.astonish.daemon"' --last 1h

# Linux: view via journalctl
journalctl --user -u astonish -f

Log files are also written to ~/.local/share/astonish/logs/.

Uninstalling

Remove the daemon registration:

astonish daemon uninstall

This stops the service and removes the plist or systemd unit file.

All Daemon Subcommands

Command	Description
daemon install	Register as a system service
daemon uninstall	Remove the system service
daemon start	Start the background service
daemon stop	Stop the background service
daemon restart	Restart the background service
daemon status	Show current daemon status
daemon run	Run in foreground (for debugging)
daemon logs	View daemon logs

See Also

• Deployment Overview — choosing between local and cloud deployment
• Kubernetes Deployment — cloud deployments use Kubernetes instead of the daemon