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Compose runs a group of workers as one project. The daemon reads a worker-compose.yaml, is able to resolve, start, and stop each worker in dependency order, handles engine registration tasks, and supervises running workers.

The daemon

The daemon is itself a worker. It registers under the name compose and exposes the compose::* functions, so every project operation is a standard trigger. Bare iii compose is the command to start the compose worker/daemon. It reads worker-compose.yaml in the working directory and starts only the compose worker. iii compose --up is provided as a convenience. It starts the compose worker, the iii engine, and the workers specified in worker-compose.yaml. It is approximately the equivalent of running iii, iii compose, and iii trigger compose::up as separate commands. iii compose --up is recommended for ease of development while more granular control and independent operation of iii and iii compose daemons is suggested for production.

Starting a project with the daemon

Ctrl^C, SIGINT and SIGTERM all gracefully stop the daemon, every worker run by the daemon, and the iii engine if compose was started with --up. When --up has started the engine, every project and worker stops before the engine process is stopped. compose::stop is the function equivalent of this operation. compose::* functions as documented below are the intended way to manage a running compose daemon.

Compose logs

Compose logs stdout and stderr output from started workers to $HOME/.iii/compose/namespace/. Logs are rotated every 10 MiB. Compose keeps up to 40 MiB of logs. Compose strips terminal control sequences before persisting the engine output. You can use the logs client for a recent snapshot or a live view:
Each line is prefixed with the worker name, and stderr uses a bold prefix on a terminal.

Running it in the background

Compose does not background or daemonize itself. To accomplish this please use standard tooling For example on most terminals (bash, zsh) you can run:
Or on a server with systemd support you can use a unit file. This is a basic example:
Use Type=simple. Type=notify waits for an sd_notify readiness message, which compose does not send.

The compose::* functions

These are the functions that control the compose worker and are the canonical way of interacting with it and making basic changes to the worker-compose.yaml file. file is not required. Left out, it falls back to a worker-compose.yaml in the daemon’s own working directory; without one, the call fails with NO_COMPOSE_FILE. A relative file path is considered relative to the daemon’s directory, not the caller’s working directory. You may pass an absolute path as well.

Starting a project

compose::up starts every worker in the compose file, in dependency order. Workers that are already ready stay as they are.

compose::up failures

A project that fails to start due to a project-related issue ends the command with PROJECT_DID_NOT_START. Partial starts are rolled back in reverse dependency order.

Stopping a project

compose::down stops the project in reverse dependency order.

Adding workers

compose::add worker=state worker=./workers/api declares one or more workers in the compose file and reconciles the project once. On the CLI, repeat worker= for each worker. Each value takes a registry package name (state), a package name with a version (state@0.21.4), or a directory (./workers/api). A JSON payload for this function can use a single list: { "workers": ["database", "web"] }. An package without a version specified will pin to the latest available version (ex. 0.23.1). Workers whose declarations did not change remain running. Existing workers whose resolved versions changed restart in place, and newly declared workers start through the normal dependency plan.

Removing a worker

compose::remove worker=state removes the named worker and every reference to it. The changes are validated before a worker is removed. Compose then stops only that worker and runs an idempotent up. Removal does not resolve the registry graph or remove other workers that were added with this worker. Those remain declared until they are removed explicitly.

Restarting one worker

compose::restart worker=state stops that specified worker and starts it again. All other workers, including dependencies, are left unchanged. compose::restart without a worker argument restarts the entire compose project. It is approximately the equivalent of compose::down followed by compose::up.

Updating a worker

compose::update worker=state updates a worker to either the current latest version when no version is specified or to the target version when it is. If the requested version is already installed this operation is treated as a NOOP.
The worker has to be declared already in order to be updated, and it has to be a package://. Use compose::add to add new workers. Workers specified with path:// are not versioned, any updates to these workers will be reflected the next time the worker is restarted.
Unlike compose::restart worker=state, an update restarts the whole project.

Checking status

compose::status reports each declared worker with its state, its pid, an owned flag, its rotating log_path, and last_error when there is one. owned is false for a worker this daemon has knowledge of but does not manage (ie. was not started by the compose daemon).

Worker states

Viewing logs

compose::logs returns recent stdout and stderr for the workers of one project. The response holds one entry per worker with container, entries, cursor, and truncated. Each entry in entries has stream and message. A cursor has generation and offset. truncated is true when the cursor sent is older than the retained archives.

Listing projects

compose::list returns the daemon name, its namespace, its pid, and other project information.

Validating a file

compose::validate validates a compose file and is intended for package develpment work. It takes file. Validation is offline, so package:// workers are reported under deferred_packages and not resolved.

Validation reports

Stopping the daemon

compose::stop stops the compose project, all associated workers, and optionally the engine if started with (--up). The compose daemon will also exit. Before exiting the daemon will return its name, pid, and the projects it is about to stop.
There is no compose::start equivalent to compose::stop. Stopping a compose daemon means it must be restarted from the server it is running on.

Viewing schema

compose::schema takes a function_id argument. With no function_id, it returns every compose::* schema. Pass a function id to return the schema for a given function_id. The pseudo-id worker-compose.yaml returns the file’s JSON Schema as request and a complete small example as response. Each entry holds function_id, description, request, response, default_timeout_ms, and idempotent. The same schemas, descriptions, and metadata are also published through engine::functions::info.

Namespaces

Namespaces are used to allow advanced architectures that require more than one running copy of a given worker, multi-tenancy, some multi-agent workflows, and various isolation schemes between different parts of a iii application. Namespaces are arbitrary and their usage depends largely on the given usecase. They do not prescribe a specific way of constructing your iii application. The two primary points where Namespaces are used are during Worker registration via Compose and during Function and Trigger interactions. All have ways of declaring which namespace to use.

Precedence

namespace is commonly defined in worker-compose.yaml but can be overriden on compose daemon startup with the --namespace flag. Likewise, compose’s own compose::* functions will exist within the same declared namespace.

What a namespace may hold

A valid namespace is made up of the lowercase characters a-z, 0-9, - and _. All other characters are not permitted and will result in an INVALID_NAMESPACE error; including uppercase letters. To prevent naming conflicts there is no coercion of invalid namespaces to valid namespaces.

One daemon to a namespace

Two compose daemons with different namespaces can share an engine. However, a second daemon claiming a namespace that is already served is refused at registration with DAEMON_ALREADY_SERVING.
Only one Compose daemon can serve a namespace on a iii engine. Set namespace: in the compose file or pass --namespace when several daemons must share one iii engine.

worker-compose.yaml

Below is an example of version 1 of a worker compose file. Unknown keys and duplicate keys are errors. Durations can specify a unit such as: 500ms, 30s, 2m.

Top-level fields

Engine fields

Allowed worker keys are configuration, iii-worker-manager, iii-http-functions, iii-stream, and iii-sandbox. Use #instance for another instance of an allowed type, for example iii-worker-manager#rbac. Internal iii-engine-functions, iii-telemetry, and iii-observability are injected and must not be declared.
These workers are always engine managed and started so this method of operating these workers is an exception to the typical way for other workers. Changes to these workers requires an engine restart.

Worker fields

Each key under containers is the name the worker registers under. path:// directories resolve against the compose file’s directory. A missing directory fails with MISSING_WORKER_DIRECTORY, and a missing env_file fails with MISSING_ENV_FILE during validation. A path worker normally runs as a host process. A non-empty runtime.base_image in its iii.worker.yaml selects a local VM instead. The worker’s scripts.install and start command then run inside that image, and compose keeps the VM state inside the project. An invalid image reference fails the start instead of falling back to the host or to another image.

Worker kinds

Worker packages can be released in multiple different “kinds”. A kind compose cannot run fails with UNSUPPORTED_PACKAGE_KIND. A bundle’s VM is booted by iii-worker, which the installer ships beside iii and which needs glibc on Linux. Compose runs it as a process rather than linking it, so the engine stays portable; a bundle worker on a machine without iii-worker fails saying so, and every other worker kind is unaffected. Bundles need a VM, and windows has none: a bundle worker there fails with BUNDLE_NEEDS_A_VM before anything is downloaded. Run compose under WSL, where the VM has KVM to run on. Every other worker kind runs on windows as it always has. Bundle support can be refused machine-wide with III_BUNDLE_WORKERS_DISABLED=1, which compose honours.

Scripts

Both hooks run with the worker’s environment, working directory, and their own process group. A post_run runs after the worker stops but before the compose daemon exits. The top-level stop_timeout argument is a global timer for a compose daemon to stop. If this time is exceeded all scripts will be exited along with the compose daemon. A path worker’s start command is scripts.run in worker-compose.yaml, or scripts.start in the worker’s own iii.worker.yaml when run is absent. A worker with neither fails with MISSING_START_COMMAND.

Configuration precedence

Lowest to highest: the configuration a package ships, the entry in the configuration worker, then config_override. The merged result is written to an owner-only file and its path is passed to the worker as III_CONFIG. A worker that declares config_name does not start when the fetch fails; the error is CONFIG_FETCH_FAILED.

The worker environment

A worker’s environment is defined by the following sources:
  1. A host baseline. On Unix: PATH, HOME, USER, LOGNAME, SHELL, TERM, TMPDIR, TZ, LANG, LC_ALL. Windows adds the variables the platform needs, such as SystemRoot, COMSPEC, and PATHEXT.
  2. The worker’s env_file entries, then its environment map.
  3. The reserved variables, which the daemon owns.
Declaring a reserved variable in environment or an env_file fails with RESERVED_ENV_OVERRIDE.

Expanding values from environment variables

Variables can be expanded with ${VAR}. References expand in any value, not only in environment. For example:
config_override is never expanded, all values are treated as literals.

Build registry packages

build reads and validates the compose file, then downloads every package:// worker into the same cache used by compose::up. The file defaults to ./worker-compose.yaml. The command does not connect to an engine, start a worker, or run lifecycle hooks. Local path:// workers and engine-managed workers need no registry download and are skipped.
The cache is shared under ~/.iii/compose/packages, or under III_COMPOSE_STATE_DIR when that variable is set. A later compose::up reuses a valid cached artifact if it exists.

Readiness

A worker is considered up when the engine reports a worker of that name in the project’s namespace. Compose polls engine::workers::list every 200 ms until the worker’s startup_timeout runs out. After a worker is ready, the daemon checks it every 250 ms. A worker that exits takes its transitive dependents down with it and is recorded as failed. Automatic restarts are not performed. When the engine connection drops and comes back, every running worker gets its startup_timeout to register again. Dependency shutdown is dependent upon when a shutdown happens:

Where compose keeps state

Compose state is stored under ~/.iii/compose, or under $III_COMPOSE_STATE_DIR when that is set. <ns> is the daemon’s namespace. <project> is derived from the compose file’s canonical path + a short hash to prevent project name collisions.

Error codes

Compose can output the following error codes:
For why compose is a worker see Understanding iii / Compose. For understanding namespaces see Understanding iii / Namespaces. For the iii compose entry in the command tree, see the CLI reference.