Launchify

Launchify is a tool that makes it super easy to schedule programs to run as regular background tasks on macOS. As an example, to schedule a program myprog to run ever 5 minutes:

$ launchify 5m myprog

Under the hood, launchify registers your program to run using launchd. It writes a boilerplate config file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and sets it up to write logs to ~/logs/myprog.

Install

Install requires the rust toolchain, which may be installed like:

$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Then install using cargo:

$ cargo install launchify

Advanced Usage

To see full CLI options, run launchify -h.

You can specify the period to run the program over as (d)ays, (h)ours, (m)inutes or (s)econds. For example, to run myprog once an hour:

$ launchify 1h myprog

Note that myprog may be either the absolute or relative path to an executable, or the name of an executable on your PATH.

Extra program args may be specified via the --args option

$ launchify 5m myprog --args="--foo bar"

You may override the default name used to label the launchify job and log directory via --name. By default the name is derived from the program filename.

$ launchify 5m myprog --name=my_awesome_program

By default, the task will be configured to run in the same working directory that you run launchify inside, however this may be overridden via the --working-dir option:

$ launchify 5m myprog --working-dir=/path/to/dir

Comparison to launchctl

launchify is not intended to replace launchctl but is a convenience tool to complement it. launchify purposely does not support the full configuration options which may be passed to launchctl but optimizes for a common use-case.

After scheduling a program using launchify, you will find the configuration file written to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.<name>.plist. To stop running the program, run:

$ launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.<name>.plist

For further information on launch agents and daemones on macOS, see https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/CreatingLaunchdJobs.html