What is overmind?

Overmind is a command-line process manager for developers who run multiple services at once during local development. If you have ever worked on a web app that requires a web server, a background job worker, and a frontend build process all running at the same time, Overmind is the tool that starts and manages all of those from a single terminal window. It reads from a file called a Procfile, a simple text file where each line gives a process a name and a command to run. You run "overmind start" in the same directory, and it launches all of those processes. Procfiles are also used by hosting platforms like Heroku, so developers often already have one. What makes Overmind distinct from other Procfile tools is that it runs each process inside tmux, a terminal multiplexer. This means the output is captured through tmux rather than piped through the tool itself, which solves a specific problem: other process managers often cause processes to think they are writing to a file rather than a terminal, which can delay output, strip colors, or cause logging to buffer instead of streaming in real time. With tmux, processes behave exactly as if they had a real terminal attached. Because each process runs in a tmux session, you can attach to any individual process at any time to interact with it directly. You can also restart a single process without stopping everything else, set certain processes to restart automatically if they crash, and allow specific processes to exit without it killing the rest of the stack. Overmind runs on Linux, BSD, and macOS. It requires tmux to be installed. You can install it via Homebrew, as a Ruby gem, or by downloading a pre-built binary. A lighter companion tool called Hivemind is available if you do not need the tmux integration.