-*- mode: org -*-

About

Guile-Daemon is a small Guile program that loads your initial configuration file, and then reads and evaluates Guile expressions that you send to a FIFO file. That’s basically it.

Normally, guile-daemon will not exit: it’s a daemon, so it just “sits” on a FIFO file waiting for commands.

Along with guile-daemon program, Guile-Daemon provides gdpipe shell script that redirects commands to the default FIFO file.

Finally, you can also connect to the daemon using a socket file (for example, with M-x geiser-connect-local if you use Geiser).

By default, socket and FIFO files are placed in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/guile-daemon/run directory ($HOME/.config/guile-daemon/run if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set).

Usage

Simply run guile-daemon (remember, it won’t fork!), and then use gdpipe to evaluate anything, like this:

gdpipe '(format #t "load path: ~a~%" %load-path)'

(on a console where guile-daemon is running you should see the load path)

I use Guile-Daemon as an OSD daemon, see my config.

Building from Git

Requirements for building from git:

• GNU Guile
• GNU Autoconf
• GNU Automake

Run ./autogen.sh to generate the build system infrastructure. After that, the program can be built and installed with the usual sequence of commands of the GNU Build System:

$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

Pre-installation environment

It is possible to use/test Guile-Daemon without installing (i.e., after running make but before running make install) with the help of pre-inst-env script in the top build tree, like this:

$ ./pre-inst-env guile-daemon &
$ ./pre-inst-env gdpipe ...

If you live in Emacs, you may find pre-inst-env.el more useful. If you load this file (for example, with M-x load-file), it will set the required environment inside Emacs, so you can run guile-daemon and gdpipe in M-x shell without prefixing them with .../pre-inst-env. And more importantly, you can start Geiser and use (daemon …) modules there!

Building/installing with Guix

The latest version of Guile-Daemon can be installed with GNU Guix: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/g.html#guile-daemon.

Also this repository contains guix.scm file which can be used to build/install Guile-Daemon using the git checkout, or to make a development environment for it (see the commentary in that file for more details).