Feat: Mac Port

@ethanpailes

Request: Ability to install and run shpool on OSX machines.

Management of persistent shell sessions on a Mac is certainly a niche usecase compared to e.g. sessions on a Linux box accessed from a Mac. However, that capability could be useful in the case of Mac desktop/home servers (e.g. the new Mac Mini devices) or in Mac build farms.

Is support for Mac a goal of shpool?

Depending on the level of difficulty, I might be interested in assisting, given some pointers on how to help.

I see work on a Mac port is mentioned by @ethanpailes here: #177 (comment)

Is that referring to the draft changes here from @jrmlhermitte :

or are there other work-in-progress artifacts for Mac support?

@ethanpailes

Unfortunately there is no work at the moment. I'm unable to commit more time to open source for a while. If you are interested please go ahead :).

That PR was just initial investigation to see what we might need to change to get it working, but there is still a lot more work to be done.

I will let @ethanpailes answer more but if you wanted to try making the right hacks to get it to build all over again, I think that's the right way to go to get started. Thanks in advance for the interest! :)

OK, thank you! If I have a chance I will poke around a bit.

Just to be clear though: I think it's worth some real consideration of the question "Is support for Mac a goal of shpool?"

There's the initial implementation to get it working, but there would also be some ongoing cost to the project maintaining cross-platform support. I want to make sure there is appetite for that, given that Mac is likely to remain a less-common usecase. The alternative would be to explicitly say the project doesn't have plans to support Mac and guide folks with that usecase toward tmux/etc.

https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool_pty has been archived. :/

Currently I see

error[E0425]: cannot find function `ptsname_r` in crate `libc`
    --> /Users/jayvdb/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/shpool_pty-0.3.1/src/fork/pty/master/mod.rs:73:29
     |
  73 |                 match libc::ptsname_r(fd, data as *mut libc::c_char, buf.len()) {
     |                             ^^^^^^^^^ help: a function with a similar name exists: `ptsname`
     |
    ::: /Users/jayvdb/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1949cf8c6b5b557f/libc-0.2.176/src/unix/mod.rs:1602:5
     |
1602 |     pub fn ptsname(fd: c_int) -> *mut c_char;
     |     ----------------------------------------- similarly named function `ptsname` defined here

For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0425`.

That repo should not be archived. I just unarchived it and am looking into why it was archived in the first place.

I hacked my way in these two branches to make it work on macOS;

By no means I think ready for upstream -little to no experience in Rust-, but they get the job done for me as they are.

That's impressively very little change. If this works this is great. Can you please make a pull request so we can review it?
I'll try to test it in the coming days.

Yeah, even if things are a little wonky, I would be happy to merge. Some amount of mac support is better than none.

@seruman

As far as I know, this was effectively blocked by shell-pool/shpool_pty#4 but that was merged recently 🥳

Would the shpool team be willing to take some of the changes from @seruman?

There was also an attempt to fix things in #48, but I think upstreaming seruman's fork is probably a nicer fix.

I'm also happy to spend some time on this if desired!

@seruman

Closing #48 because it is too stale (have had no bandwidth for this).

Please yes @seruman or @c22 make a PR!

@c22

@c22 I cut a new release of shpool_pty so that that change could get picked up. I think @seruman said they had a version of shpool that was building on mac and they were thinking of upstreaming it. If you want to do the work of converting their fork into a PR for the main shpool repo though, we'd be happy to take the patch. (though if you are working on it actively @seruman speak up so that @c22 doesn't waste the time).

@ethanpailes

@ethanpailes i won't be able to allocate time for this for some time. @c22 feel free to take over it; master...seruman:shpool:macos

AFAIR replacing INotifyWatcher with RecommendedWatcher caused config watcher tests to fail on macOS tho.

No pressure. Thanks for making the fork in the first place!

I hope this is along the lines of what you guys are after

#300

@c22

Thanks @c22! I haven't looked at the diff in detail yet, but I appreciate the work!

@c22

Thank you @c22, thanks for picking this up!

This is now done. There are some test cases that are disabled for macos, but the core of it builds and seems to work. We're testing against mac in CI to prevent regressions.

The remaining tests can be re-enabled in followup changes.

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Feat: Mac Port #183

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Feat: Mac Port #183

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jrmlhermitte commented on Dec 29, 2024

jgiles commented on Dec 30, 2024

jayvdb commented on Oct 7, 2025

ethanpailes commented on Oct 7, 2025

seruman commented on Oct 21, 2025

jrmlhermitte commented on Oct 24, 2025

ethanpailes commented on Oct 27, 2025

c22 commented on Jan 23, 2026

jrmlhermitte commented on Jan 23, 2026

ethanpailes commented on Jan 23, 2026

seruman commented on Jan 23, 2026

ethanpailes commented on Jan 23, 2026

c22 commented on Jan 29, 2026

ethanpailes commented on Jan 29, 2026

seruman commented on Jan 29, 2026

ethanpailes commented on Feb 6, 2026

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