Piperack

Run concurrent commands without turning your terminal into a crime scene.

Stop juggling terminal tabs. Stop squinting at interleaved logs where a stack trace from your API gets mixed with Webpack build noise. If you are still running npm-run-all or concurrently and hoping for the best, you are wasting your time deciphering chaos. Concurrency is not the problem. Unreadable output is.

Piperack fixes this. It replaces your fragile manual workflow with a deterministic, structured TUI. One command. Zero headaches.

Install (Homebrew)

brew tap pipe-rack/homebrew-tap
brew install pipe-rack/homebrew-tap/piperack

Prefixing lines is not observability.

Most process runners are just & wrapped in a runtime. They dump stdout to your console and let you figure it out. Piperack ingests logs into structured buffers, giving you a dedicated view for every process.

Parallel logs don’t need to be interleaved.

Piperack is a single binary that treats your local environment like a production cluster.

• Native Performance: Written in Rust. ~3k LOC. No daemon. No plugins. No node_modules black hole required just to run a script.
• Real Orchestration: Define depends_on and ready_check policies. Services start when they are actually ready, not when you "feel like it."
• Intelligent TUI: Filter (F), search (/), and format JSON (j) in real-time. Don't just tail logs—interact with them.
• Structured Data: Your logs are JSON. Piperack knows that. It parses and pretty-prints them automatically.

Quick Start

Inline for speed:

piperack --name api -- cargo run --name web -- pnpm dev

Configured for sanity:

piperack --config examples/full_stack.toml

Documentation

• Installation
• Usage
• Configuration
• Architecture
• Testing

Configuration

No config DSL. Just type-safe TOML.

Tip: Use the AI skill to generate this automatically: npx skills add pipe-rack/skills.

# piperack.toml
# Defaults that make sense.
prefix_colors = true
log_file = "logs/{name}.log"

# 1. Database
[[process]]
name = "postgres"
cmd = "docker run --rm -p 5432:5432 postgres"
tags = ["db", "backend"]
# Stop guessing. Check.
ready_check = { log = "database system is ready to accept connections" }

# 2. Redis
[[process]]
name = "redis"
cmd = "redis-server"
tags = ["db", "cache"]
ready_check = { tcp = 6379 }

# 3. API
[[process]]
name = "api"
cmd = "go run main.go"
tags = ["backend"]
# Block startup until dependencies are healthy.
depends_on = ["postgres", "redis"]
watch = ["*.go"] 
json_log = true

# 4. Frontend
[[process]]
name = "web"
cmd = "pnpm dev"
tags = ["frontend"]
depends_on = ["api"]

Controls

Your terminal can handle more than stdout.

Key	Action
?	Toggle Help
/	Search (Live highlight matches)
F	Filter (Show only matching lines)
j	JSON Mode (Toggle pretty-printing)
t	Timeline (View merged output context)
g	Group Restart (Restart by tag)
Mouse	Select process & scroll logs

Contributing

We built this because we were tired of bad tools. If you want to improve Piperack, keep it fast, keep it safe, and keep it idiomatic.

This is a tool, not a product.

1. Fork it.
2. Branch it.
3. PR it.