Background alerts

Background alerts are lazykuma watch, started for you at login, so outages reach you with lazykuma closed.

lazykuma autostart on    # register watch to start at login, and start it now
lazykuma autostart off   # remove it, and stop it
lazykuma autostart       # say whether it is on, and whether a watch runs

The Background alerts switch in the menu does the same as on and off.

$ lazykuma autostart
background alerts: on (systemd user service)
runs: /home/you/.local/bin/lazykuma
watch: running (pid 4182)

Per system

Nothing needs admin rights. Each system gets its own mechanism, and its own place for the output:

System	Registered as	Output
Linux with a systemd user session	~/.config/systemd/user/lazykuma-watch.service	journalctl --user -u lazykuma-watch
Linux without one	~/.config/autostart/lazykuma-watch.desktop (XDG autostart)	watch.log in the state folder
macOS	~/Library/LaunchAgents/io.github.icortesb.lazykuma.watch.plist	~/Library/Logs/lazykuma/watch.log
Windows	a lazykuma-watch value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run	watch.log in the state folder

The state folder is ~/.local/state/lazykuma (%LocalAppData%\lazykuma on Windows); see Files.

Logs

watch.log stops at 1 MB: it then becomes watch.log.1, replacing the previous one, and a new file starts. On macOS launchd writes the log itself, and it is not trimmed.

To follow it:

journalctl --user -u lazykuma-watch -f          # Linux, systemd
tail -f ~/.local/state/lazykuma/watch.log       # Linux, XDG autostart
tail -f ~/Library/Logs/lazykuma/watch.log       # macOS

On Windows, open %LocalAppData%\lazykuma\watch.log.

The binary it runs

on registers the binary you run it with, so run it again after moving lazykuma or installing a new one somewhere else. lazykuma status warns when the registered binary is not the one running.

The systemd unit and the launch agent carry your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_STATE_HOME, if set, so the background watch reads the same config as the terminal.

A watch you started by hand

Only one watch runs at a time. A watch you started yourself in a terminal meets the background one differently per system:

• XDG autostart and Windows: nothing supervises the watch, so on and off stop whatever watch runs, yours included, and on starts the registered one in its place.
• systemd and launchd leave yours alone. It keeps running, and the service tries again every 30 seconds until yours stops, then takes over.

lazykuma autostart says started by hand for a watch that runs while autostart is off.

Troubleshooting

No notifications, but the watch runs. Check the output (table above) for desktop notification: errors — on Linux, a notification daemon must be running in your session. Check [notify] watch is not false in config.toml.

off fails on systemd. off needs the user session to answer while the unit file is there — systemctl --user must work. Without it the unit cannot be stopped, and off says so rather than leave a service behind.

A unit you wrote yourself. A unit at ~/.config/systemd/user/lazykuma-watch.service, written by hand before lazykuma could do it, is taken over by on.

It watches the wrong instances. The background watch reads the config at the path its environment gives. If you set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME after turning it on, run lazykuma autostart on again.

watch already running. Another watch holds the lock: lazykuma autostart shows its process id.