Inside doctor
doctor is deliberately small and boring. Your operating system keeps doctor alive, and doctor keeps the rest of the stack alive: it probes, classifies, heals, and escalates, and stays silent when everything is fine.
What doctor does, every 30 seconds
- 01
Probe
doctor keeps a small registry of the daemons it watches and probes each one's health endpoint every 30 seconds.
- 02
Classify
It does not just learn that something is wrong, it learns the kind of wrong: down, wedged, or degraded in a specific subsystem.
- 03
Heal
It climbs a repair ladder: restart, reinstall after three failures, remove a conflicting package, back off between attempts, and stop the instant health returns.
- 04
Escalate
If the ladder runs out, doctor writes a structured report of what it found, every step it tried, and what it recommends, and posts it to a local status page.
Safe updates, with automatic rollback.
doctor keeps the memory daemon current only behind a blessed-release gate. A version has to be explicitly approved for rollout, the update is verified healthy afterward, and a failed verify rolls back to the version that worked. A bad release cannot spread itself. doctor never auto-updates its own package.
See the whole stackUnder the hood
- status page
- 127.0.0.1:3852
- probe interval
- 30 seconds
- repair ladder
- restart, reinstall, remove conflict, back off
- updates
- blessed-release gate with rollback
- supervised by
- launchd / systemd / Scheduled Task
Common questions
What is the repair ladder?
An escalating sequence: restart, reinstall after three restarts fail, remove a conflicting package, back off between attempts, and stop the instant health returns.
How does doctor update a daemon safely?
Only behind a blessed-release gate. A version must be explicitly approved, the update is verified healthy, and a failed verify rolls back to the version that worked.
What supervises doctor?
Your operating system: launchd, systemd, or a Scheduled Task. That is what lets doctor survive crashes and reboots and supervise everything else.
Never lose a morning to a dead daemon.
doctor installs with the rest of the stack and starts watching immediately.
Windows (PowerShell): irm https://get.theapiary.sh/install.ps1 | iex
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