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I've been working on a new iteration of the Data.Conduit.Process API over the past few days. The current API (provided by the process-conduit package), has some issues. So I'm starting over with a new API, and will be including this in conduit-extra's next release.

Before releasing, I'd like to get some feedback on the new API. I've put together a School of Haskell tutorial, which will ultimately become the real documentation for this module. It describes usage of the library, as well as why the library looks the way it does. You can view the source on the process branch of conduit.

In case anyone's wondering, the "well known bug" in waitForProcess may actually not be very well known yet. There's a race condition documented in the source code, but it's not nearly as narrow a window as implied there. For example, the following code will reliably throw an exception:

import System.Process import Control.Concurrent.Async main :: IO () main = do (_, _, _, ph) <- createProcess $ shell "sleep 1" let helper i = do ec <- waitForProcess ph print (i :: Int, ec) ((), ()) <- concurrently (helper 1) (helper 2) return ()

Thus the motivation for fixing the problem in Data.Conduit.Process. Thanks go to Michael Sloan for discovering the severity of this race condition. In fact, the bug he ran into, combined with a separate process-conduit bug I ran up against, were the impetus for me getting this library written now.

For the lazy, here's a copy of the content from School of Haskell:

NOTE: This tutorial documents a not-yet-released version of conduit-extra's Data.Conduit.Process module. Currently, that module name is provided by process-conduit, which provides a completely different API. This tutorial is present now for early feedback. If you'd like to experiment, this code is available on the process branch of the conduit repo.

Introduction

Whenever you run an external process, there are four ways to interact with it post-creation:

Write to its standard input

Read from its standard output

Read from its standard error

Check its exit code

The standard System.Process module provides means for all of these interactions. However, there are some downsides with using them:

Many of the function in System.Process rely on lazy I/O.

There is a subtle race condition when checking for exit codes.

Dealing with Handle s directly is relatively low-level.

Data.Conduit.Process provides a higher-level interface for these four interactions, based on conduit. It additionally leverages type classes to provide more static type safety than dealing directly with System.Process, as will be described below. The library is also designed to work with the wonderful async library, providing for easy, high-quality concurrency.

Note that providing general parameters for creating a process, such as its working directory or modified environment variables, are not addressed by this module; you should instead use the standard facilities from System.Process.

Synopsis

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} import Control.Applicative ((*>)) import Control.Concurrent.Async (Concurrently (..)) import Control.Concurrent.Async (Concurrently (..)) import Data.Conduit (await, yield, ($$), (=$)) import qualified Data.Conduit.Binary as CB import qualified Data.Conduit.List as CL import Data.Conduit.Process (ClosedStream (..), conduitProcess, proc, waitForConduitProcess) import System.IO (stdin) main :: IO () main = do putStrLn "Enter lines of data. I'll base64-encode it." putStrLn "Enter \"quit\" to exit." ((toProcess, close), fromProcess, ClosedStream, cph) <- conduitProcess (proc "base64" []) let input = CB.sourceHandle stdin $$ CB.lines =$ inputLoop =$ toProcess inputLoop = do mbs <- await case mbs of Nothing -> close Just "quit" -> close Just bs -> do yield bs inputLoop output = fromProcess $$ CL.mapM_ (\bs -> putStrLn $ "from process: " ++ show bs) ec <- runConcurrently $ Concurrently input *> Concurrently output *> Concurrently (waitForConduitProcess cph) putStrLn $ "Process exit code: " ++ show ec

Exit codes

There's a well documented corner case in waitForProcess whereby multiple calls can end up in a race condition, and therefore a deadlock. Data.Conduit.Process works around this issue by not providing direct access to a ProcessHandle . Instead, it wraps this with a ConduitProcessHandle , which uses an STM TMVar under the surface. This allows you to either poll to check if a process has exited, or block and wait for the process to exit. As a minimal example (ignore the streaming bits for now, they'll be explained shortly).

import Data.Conduit.Process main :: IO () main = do (Inherited, Inherited, Inherited, cph) <- conduitProcess (shell "sleep 2") -- non-blocking getConduitProcessExitCode cph >>= print -- blocking waitForConduitProcess cph >>= print

If you need direct access to the ProcessHandle (e.g., to terminate a process), you can use conduitProcessHandleRaw .

Streaming

Now to the main event: streaming data. There are multiple ways you can interact with streams with an external process:

Let the child process inherit the stream from the parent process

Provide a pre-existing Handle .

. Create a new Handle to allow more control of the interaction.

One downside of the System.Process API is that there is no static type safety to ensure that the std_out parameter in fact matches up with the value produced by createProcess for the standard output handle. To overcome this, Data.Conduit.Process makes use of type classes to represent the different ways to create a stream. This isn't entirely intuitive from the Haddocks, but once you see the concept used, it's easy to use yourself.

Inherited and ClosedStream

Let's start with an example of using the simplest instances of our typeclasses. Inherited says to inherit the Handle from the parent process, while ClosedStream says to close the stream to the child process. For example, the next snippet will inherit stdin and stdout from the parent process and close standard error.

import Data.Conduit.Process main :: IO () main = do putStrLn "Just wrapping cat. Use Ctrl-D to exit." (Inherited, Inherited, ClosedStream, cph) <- conduitProcess (shell "cat") waitForConduitProcess cph >>= print

Note that there's no way to send an EOF in School of Haskell, so the above active code will never terminate.

Conduit

It would be pretty strange to have a library in conduit-extra that didn't provide some conduit capabilities. You can additionally get a Sink to be used to feed data into the process via standard input, and Source s for consuming standard output and error.

This next example reads standard input from the console, process standard output with a conduit, and closes standard error.

import Data.Conduit (($$)) import qualified Data.Conduit.List as CL import Data.Conduit.Process main :: IO () main = do putStrLn "Just wrapping cat. Use Ctrl-D to exit." (Inherited, src, ClosedStream, cph) <- conduitProcess (shell "cat") src $$ CL.mapM_ print waitForConduitProcess cph >>= print

Note that these Source s and Sink s will never close their Handle s. This is done on purpose, to allow them to be used multiple times without accidentally closing their streams. In many cases, you'll need to close the streams manually, which brings us to our next section.

Conduit + close

Let's say we'd like to close our input stream whenever the user types in "quit". To do that, we need to get an action to close the standard input Handle . This is simple: instead of just returning a Source or Sink , we ask for a tuple of a Source / Sink together with an IO () action to close the handle.

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} import Data.ByteString (ByteString) import Data.Conduit (Source, await, yield, ($$), ($=)) import qualified Data.Conduit.Binary as CB import Data.Conduit.Process import System.IO (stdin) userInput :: Source IO ByteString userInput = CB.sourceHandle stdin $= CB.lines $= loop where loop = do mbs <- await case mbs of Nothing -> return () Just "quit" -> return () Just bs -> do yield bs yield "

" loop main :: IO () main = do putStrLn "Just wrapping cat. Type \"quit\" to exit." ((sink, close), Inherited, ClosedStream, cph) <- conduitProcess (shell "cat") userInput $$ sink close waitForConduitProcess cph >>= print

UseProvidedHandle

Let's take a quick detour from our running example to talk about the last special type: UseProvidedHandle . This says to conduitProcess : use the example value of UseHandle provided in std_in / std_out / std_err . We can use this to redirect output directly to a file:

import Data.Conduit.Process import System.IO (withFile, IOMode (..)) main :: IO () main = do let fp = "date.txt" withFile fp WriteMode $ \h -> do (ClosedStream, UseProvidedHandle, ClosedStream, cph) <- conduitProcess (shell "date") { std_out = UseHandle h } waitForConduitProcess cph >>= print readFile fp >>= print

Use with async

In our examples above, we only ever used a single Source or Sink at a time. There's a good reason for this: we can easily run into deadlocks if we don't properly handle concurrency. There are multiple ways to do this, but I'm going to strongly recommend using the async package, which handles many corner cases automatically. In particular, the Concurrently data type and its Applicative instance make it easy and safe to handle multiple streams at once.

Instead of duplicating it here, I'll ask the reader to please refer back to the synopsis example, which ties this all together with two threads for handling streams, and another thread which blocks waiting for the process to exit. That style of concurrency is very idiomatic usage of this library.