Guardian - Windows Process Supervisor

Guardian is a lightweight, modern, and high-performance desktop application designed to run and monitor background processes on Windows. Inspired by Linux's supervisor, Guardian ensures your custom commands and executables run continuously, recover automatically from crashes, and stream real-time logs through a beautiful dark-themed glassmorphic user interface.

Developed using Rust (Tauri v2) for the backend process manager and Vue 3 + TypeScript for the dashboard UI.

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Key Features

• 🖥️ Windows Console Prevention: Launches processes completely in the background without flashing native Windows CMD/PowerShell terminal frames (CREATE_NO_WINDOW flag integration).
• 🔄 Automatic Restart (Auto-Recovery): Automatically detects when a process exits or crashes (non-zero status codes) and spawns it back after a 2-second cooldown, respecting configurable retry limiters.
• ⚡ Auto-Start on Boot: Processes marked as auto_start are automatically spawned on application launch, restoring your background workspace states instantly.
• 🗄️ SQLite Storage Engine: All process configurations are stored in an atomic local SQLite database (guardian.db) rather than plain JSON files, ensuring stability and query-level atomicity.
• 📂 Native File Dialog: Click a button to browse and select executable files (.exe, .bat, .cmd, .ps1, etc.) directly from your system.
• 🌳 Process Tree Termination: When stopping a process, Guardian executes a recursive forced termination (taskkill /F /T) to ensure that any spawned sub-processes are completely killed, preventing orphaned processes.
• 📋 Real-time Log Streaming & Tailing:
  • Automatically captures both stdout and stderr streams.
  • Writes logs asynchronously to dedicated process log files on disk.
  • Implements a high-performance backward file tailing system (using reverse search offsets) to display the last N lines instantly.
  • Streams logs to a monospaced log terminal with auto-scroll toggling.
• 🎨 Premium Glassmorphic Dashboard: A sleek dark mode UI designed with Inter typography, JetBrains Mono terminal, and customized animated SweetAlert2 alerts and deletion dialogs.

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System Architecture

graph TD
    A[Vue 3 Frontend] <-->|IPC Invoke / Events| B[Tauri v2 Bridge]
    B <-->|State Access| C[Rust ProcessManager]
    C <-->|Query / Write| D[(SQLite - guardian.db)]
    C -->|Spawn & Monitor| E[tokio::process::Child]
    E -->|Write stdout/stderr| F[Process Log Files]
    C -->|Tail Seek| F

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Directory & File Locations (Windows)

All data files are located in the standard Windows AppData Roaming folder:

• Database File: C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\com.beyhan.guardian\guardian.db
• Process Logs Directory: C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\com.beyhan.guardian\logs\<process_id>.log

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Installation & Setup

Prerequisites

To compile and run Guardian, you must have the following installed on your machine:

• Node.js (v18+)
• pnpm (Recommended package manager)
• Rust Toolchain (via rustup)
• C++ Build Tools (installed automatically via Visual Studio installer or rustup windows toolchain)

Steps

1. Clone the Repository:

   git clone https://github.com/beyhano/guardian.git
   cd guardian

2. Install Frontend Dependencies:

   pnpm install

3. Run in Development Mode: This command starts the Vite development server and launches the Tauri desktop application.

   pnpm tauri dev

4. Build Production Executable: This compiles the optimized production version and packs it into a standalone Windows installer (.msi or .exe).

   pnpm tauri build

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Configuration & Customization (CLAUDE.md)

Developer instructions, styling guidelines, and strict architectural constraints (e.g. FFI limitations, compilation targets, and auto-resume hooks) are documented in the CLAUDE.md developer guide.

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License

This project is open-source and available under the MIT License.