JobU

JobU (Job Orchestration and Broker Utility) is a portable C++20 service for running scheduled command-line and HTTP jobs in the background. The planned v1 service includes independently managed queues, retries and timeouts, recurring jobs, execution history, and output capture. jobuctl communicates with the jobud daemon through a local JSON-RPC API over a Unix-domain socket, and SQLite provides persistence.

Important

JobU is under active development and is not ready for production use. The repository currently provides the foundational libraries, SQLite support, local IPC and JSON-RPC, and the first jobud/jobuctl system.info flow; scheduling and job execution are still being implemented.

Components

• jobud — the background daemon that hosts the queues, schedules jobs, and executes them, exposing a local JSON-RPC API over a Unix-domain socket.
• jobuctl — the control client for managing queues and jobs from the command line; it talks to jobud over that same JSON-RPC API.

Platforms

The current source tree is built and tested on:

• Ubuntu 24.04
• Alpine Linux 3.22
• macOS with Apple Clang and Homebrew dependencies

Linux is the primary development platform. Linux and macOS both support the current local IPC, JSON-RPC, daemon, and control-client functionality. Windows is not a v1 runtime target.

Requirements

The build requires CMake 3.20 or newer, a C++20 compiler, fmt, SQLite, nlohmann/json, Catch2 3.x for tests, and Ninja or another CMake-supported build tool. The planned HTTP runner will require libcurl, but it is not yet a build dependency.

Ubuntu 24.04

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --yes --no-install-recommends \
    catch2 cmake g++ libfmt-dev libsqlite3-dev ninja-build \
    nlohmann-json3-dev

Alpine Linux 3.22

Alpine does not ship sudo by default, so run the following as root (or install sudo first):

apk add --no-cache \
    catch2-3 cmake fmt-dev g++ nlohmann-json samurai sqlite-dev tzdata

macOS

Install the Xcode Command Line Tools and Homebrew, then install the build dependencies:

xcode-select --install
brew install catch2 cmake fmt ninja nlohmann-json sqlite

Build and test

Clone the repository and move into its root:

git clone https://github.com/evaikene/deferra.git
cd deferra

Configure and build:

cmake -S . -B .bld -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build .bld
ctest --test-dir .bld/test --output-on-failure

The SQLite driver is enabled by default and is required to build jobud. Disable it when only the backend-independent libraries and jobuctl are needed:

cmake -S . -B .bld -G Ninja \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
    -DJB_BUILD_SQLITE_DRIVER=OFF
cmake --build .bld

AI-supported development experiment

JobU is also an experiment in incremental, AI-supported software development: each design stage is reviewed, built, and tested before the next stage begins.

License

JobU is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.