orphan-watchdog

A lightweight watchdog and process supervisor that prevents abandoned background processes and development servers from pegging CPU cores after their parent application exits.

Designed for Linux workstations running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and newer.

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Installation

From Debian Package (Recommended)

Download the .deb from the Releases page:

sudo dpkg -i orphan-watchdog_1.0.4_all.deb

This installs the binaries, writes the default configuration, and automatically enables and starts orphan-watchdog.timer.

From Source

git clone https://github.com/okaythi/orphan-watchdog.git
cd orphan-watchdog
sudo make install
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now orphan-watchdog.timer

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Usage

Supervising Child Processes

Prefix any background command or server with mcp-guardian to bind its process tree lifecycle directly to the caller:

mcp-guardian npx @some/server run

Running an Audit (Dry Run)

Inspect what the watchdog would act upon without sending signals:

orphan-watchdog --dry-run

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License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).