5.2 Read-Eval-Print Loop Service ¶

Scheme wouldn’t be Scheme without support for live hacking, and your favorite service manager had to support it too! The REPL service provides a read-eval-print loop (REPL) that lets you interact with it from the comfort of the Guile REPL (see Running Guile Interactively in GNU Guile Reference Manual).

The service listens for connections on a Unix-domain socket—by default /var/run/shepherd/repl when running as root and /run/user/uid/shepherd/repl otherwise—and spawns a new service for each client connection. Clients can use the REPL as they would do with a “normal” REPL, except that it lets them inspect and modify the state of the shepherd process itself.

Caveat: The live REPL is a powerful tool in support of live hacking and debugging, but it’s also a dangerous one: depending on the code you execute, you could lock the shepherd process, make it crash, or who knows what.

One particular aspect to keep in mind is that shepherd currently uses Fibers in such a way that scheduling among fibers is cooperative and non-preemptive. Beware!

A configuration file that enables the REPL service looks like this:

(use-modules (shepherd service repl))

(register-services (list (repl-service)))

With that in place, you can later start the REPL:

herd start repl

From there you can connect to the REPL socket. If you use Emacs, you might fancy doing it with Geiser’s geiser-connect-local function (see Geiser User Manual).

The (shepherd service repl) module exports the following bindings.

Procedure: repl-service [socket-file] ¶

Return a REPL service that listens to socket-file.

Variable: default-repl-socket-file ¶

This parameter specifies the socket file name repl-service uses by default.