pueue

pueue is a daemon-based task queue manager for the shell. Instead of running long commands in the foreground or backgrounding them haphazardly with &, pueue gives you a proper queue: add tasks, control how many run in parallel, pause and resume them, inspect their output, and get notified when they finish — all from the command line.

It's particularly useful for batch jobs: encoding videos, running large test suites, syncing files, or any situation where you have more tasks than you want to run simultaneously.

Features

• Persistent daemon — pueued runs in the background and survives terminal sessions; tasks keep running even if you close your shell
• Parallel execution — configure how many tasks run concurrently; the rest wait in the queue
• Groups — organise tasks into named groups, each with their own parallelism setting
• Full output capture — stdout and stderr of every task are captured and can be inspected at any time with pueue log
• Follow live output — stream the output of a running task in real time with pueue follow
• Dependencies — tasks can depend on other tasks, only starting once their dependencies succeed
• Callbacks — run a shell command automatically when a task finishes (e.g. send a notification)
• Stash & schedule — add tasks in a paused state or schedule them to start at a specific time
• Clean interface — pueue status gives a colour-coded table of all tasks and their states

Installation

cargo install pueue

Or via your system package manager:

# Debian / Ubuntu
apt install pueue

# Fedora
dnf install pueue

# Arch Linux
pacman -S pueue

# macOS
brew install pueue

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.pueue

Setup

Start the daemon (add this to your init system or shell profile to run it automatically):

pueued --daemonize

On systems with systemd, a user service can be enabled instead:

systemctl --user enable --now pueued

Usage

# Add a task to the queue
pueue add "sleep 10 && echo done"

# Add a task with a label
pueue add --label "encode video" "ffmpeg -i input.mkv output.mp4"

# Check the status of all tasks
pueue status

# Stream the live output of a running task (by ID)
pueue follow 0

# Show the captured output of a finished task
pueue log 0

# Pause the queue (finish current tasks, don't start new ones)
pueue pause

# Resume the queue
pueue start

# Run tasks in parallel (set parallelism to 4)
pueue parallel 4

# Kill a running task
pueue kill 0

# Remove a finished or failed task from the list
pueue remove 0

# Clean up all successfully finished tasks
pueue clean

Groups and parallelism

# Create a group with a parallelism limit of 2
pueue group add downloads --parallel 2

# Add a task to the group
pueue add --group downloads "wget https://example.com/file1.zip"
pueue add --group downloads "wget https://example.com/file2.zip"
pueue add --group downloads "wget https://example.com/file3.zip"
# file3 will wait until one of the first two finishes

Dependencies

# Task 1 runs first
pueue add "echo step-one"

# Task 2 only starts after task 0 succeeds
pueue add --after 0 "echo step-two"

Configuration

Pueue is configured via ~/.config/pueue/pueue.yml. Key options include:

daemon:
  default_parallel_tasks: 1
  pause_all_on_failure: false
  pause_group_on_failure: false

client:
  restart_in_place: false
  read_local_logs: true
  show_confirmation_questions: false