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 SQLite persistence, local IPC and JSON-RPC, deterministic scheduling, and real asynchronous HTTP execution through the scheduler composed in jobud. Command-line job execution is still planned.

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 and supports the current HTTP scheduler, local IPC, JSON-RPC, daemon, and control-client functionality. macOS supports the existing local service functionality, while complete HTTP and daemon verification remains planned. Windows is not a v1 runtime target.

Requirements

The build requires CMake 3.20 or newer, a C++20 compiler, fmt, SQLite, libcurl 7.85 or newer, nlohmann/json, Catch2 3.x and OpenSSL for tests, and Ninja or another CMake-supported build tool. The private system HTTP backend verifies its linked libcurl runtime before jobud enters its event loop.

Ubuntu 24.04

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --yes --no-install-recommends \
    catch2 cmake g++ libcurl4-openssl-dev libfmt-dev libssl-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 curl-dev fmt-dev g++ nlohmann-json openssl-dev 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 curl fmt ninja nlohmann-json openssl@3 sqlite

Homebrew's curl formula may be keg-only. If CMake selects the system curl instead, configure with -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$(brew --prefix curl)" to select the Homebrew installation without hard-coding its architecture-specific path.

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

Run the daemon

Start jobud with its required local socket and SQLite database paths:

.bld/src/jobud/jobud --socket /tmp/jobud.sock --database ./jobu.sqlite

HTTP scheduling accepts these optional daemon settings:

• --http-concurrency N sets the positive global HTTP concurrency limit and defaults to 16.
• --http-proxy URL configures one explicit HTTP or HTTPS proxy. When omitted, JobU ignores proxy environment variables.
• --http-ca-bundle PATH selects an explicit certificate-authority bundle.

HTTP jobs verify certificate trust and host identity by default. CLI job definitions can be managed, but their execution remains planned.

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. The approved technical and phase-level design documents are available in docs/planning.

License

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