Procman ROS

Porting of the orignal Procman package to ROS.

Procman

Procman is a tool for managing many processes distributed over one or more computers. There are several ways to use procman:

Sheriff / Deputy GUI mode

In this mode, every workstation runs a deputy process:

rosrun procman_ros deputy

If you like, you can specify a name for the deputy with -i name. By default, the deputy will use the hostname of the machine it is run on.

One workstation runs a sheriff process, which provides a GUI to command and communicate with the deputies:

rosrun procman_ros sheriff procman_config.pmd

Using the GUI, you can:

• create/edit/remove processes
• start/stop/restart processes
• aggregate processes together into logical groups (e.g., "Planning")
• view the console output of each process
• save and load process configuration files
• view process statistics (memory, CPU usage)

If you want to start processes on the machine running the sheriff process, the sheriff can start its own deputy. To operate in this lone ranger mode, run

rosrun procman_ros sheriff --lone-ranger

Alternatively, you can start a deputy independently as above. Note that when the sheriff starts a deputy its name will be localhost.

Environment variables

If the commands you are using a deputy to start require specific environment variables to be available, you must have them defined in the terminal when starting the deputy.

C++ API

Procman also provides a C++ API for spawning and managing child processes, comparable to the Python subprocess module.

Build Instructions

The package has been catkinized. To compile it, just run:

catkin build procman_ros

in your workspace

Dependencies

• rocpp
• rospy
• Python
• PyGObject/GTK+3

Currently only tested on GNU/Linux. Some stuff will definitely only work on Linux (e.g., the process memory, CPU statistics).

Debugging

To view debug output, start deputies with

ROSCONSOLE_CONFIG_FILE=`rospack find procman_ros`/config/rosconsole/debug.config rosrun procman_ros deputy -i localhost -v

Documentation

Documentation is built with Doxygen.

cd doc
doxygen

Credits

• Original program by Albert Huang.
• Catkinization and porting from LCM to ROS by Marco Camurri and Michal Staniaszek
• Porting to PyGObject/GTK+3 by Michal Staniaszek

License

This software is released under the BSD-3 Software License. See the LICENSE for more details.