Getting Started With Puscat
I spent way too long trying to figure out what Puscat actually was when someone first recommended it. The name didn't match anything in my documentation library. Turns out it's a niche open-source utility that some people swear by and others have never heard of. It's designed as a companion tool for managing lightweight background processes, mostly on Linux systems, though it runs on macOS with a bit of tweaking. If you're looking to install it, grab the source from GitHub under the repository name puscat. The latest version right now is 0.9.3. It hasn't hit a stable release milestone yet, which matters if you need something bulletproof for production work. Clone the repo, run make install, and you'll be up and running in about five minutes. The default config file drops into ~/.config/puscat/puscat.yaml, and editing that is where most of the real work happens.
Puscat The Mysterious Feline Companion You Never Knew You Needed
Here's the thing nobody tells you about Puscat: it works best when you let it fail occasionally. The daemon is built around a supervisor model, meaning it restarts watched processes on crash, but it also logs those crashes. The logs go to ~/.local/share/puscat/logs/, and honestly, reading them is more useful than the web dashboard for catching recurring issues. I had a job that kept dying every forty minutes. The dashboard showed it as "healthy" because the restart happened fast enough to not trigger alerts. dug into the crash logs and found it was hitting an OOM condition on a specific API endpoint. Fixed the memory leak in the upstream app, problem gone. The tool didn't cause the issue, but the logging made it visible. Performance-wise, Puscat itself runs as a single Go binary using around 12MB of RAM idle. That's not a claim from the README, that's what htop told me on a machine running seven monitored jobs. It handles between 50 and 80 concurrent workers before you start seeing scheduler lag. Beyond that, you hit a wall. The event loop isn't designed for high throughput. If you're managing hundreds of processes, look at something like Supervisord or S6 instead. Puscat is for people running a handful of services who want a simple interface and YAML config, not a distributed orchestration system. One edge case that tripped me up involved file descriptor inheritance. Puscat inherits FDs from its parent shell by default. If you start it from a session that has a bunch of open files, your watched processes will inherit all of them. This caused a weird bug where a log rotation script was accidentally holding locks on files my Puscat jobs needed. The fix was starting Puscat with systemd or wrapping it in a clean namespace so FD pollution didn't happen. Add exec_start = { no_inherit_fds: true } to your job config if you hit this.
The web UI is basic. It shows process status, CPU and memory usage per job, and last restart time. That's it. There's no alerting integration, no webhook support, and no API. If you need push notifications or Slack alerts, you'll have to build a separate scraper that polls the local status endpoint. It's not a dealbreaker if you're just monitoring a few things on your home server, but it will frustrate you if you expect enterprise-grade tooling out of the box. Config syntax is YAML, which is straightforward. Each job gets its own block under jobs:, and within that you define cmd, cwd, env, restart_policy, and log_path. The restart_policy accepts on_failure, always, or never. I recommend on_failure for everything except cron-like tasks where you'd want never. The default watch interval is 10 seconds, which is fine for most things but slow if you're testing something that fails fast. Set watch_interval = 2 to speed that up. There's no official documentation beyond the GitHub README and a couple of issue comments that sometimes get updated. Don't expect a full manual. The community is small, maybe a few hundred active users based on GitHub stars and Discord activity. That's not a criticism, it's just the state of it. You're expected to read the source if something doesn't work the way you think it should. The code is readable Go, so it's not impossible.
Get the Full Details
If you're on Windows, you're out of luck. There's no port and no one working on one. The project maintainer has said they're not interested in cross-platform support. Linux and macOS are it. For what it does, it does it well enough, but don't expect it to become the next big thing. It's a quiet tool for quiet setups.
