Tickle 🎯

An almost-entirely vibe-coded smart systemd service and Docker restart tool. For systemd, it intelligently chooses between restart and stop/start based on service capabilities, and keeps a history of tickles.

More docs in docs/.

Install

cargo install --git https://github.com/andygeorge/tickle#0.9.1 && sudo cp ~/.cargo/bin/tickle /usr/bin/tickle

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/andygeorge/tickle
cd tickle
cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/tickle /usr/local/bin/

Usage

tickle nginx                        # restart a service (smart detection)
tickle nginx postgresql redis       # restart multiple services in sequence
tickle start nginx postgresql       # start services
tickle stop nginx postgresql        # stop services
tickle -s apache2                   # force stop/start instead of restart
tickle -f nginx                     # restart, then follow journalctl logs
tickle                              # in a compose dir: down + up -d
tickle -f                           # restart compose stack, then follow logs
tickle -p paperless                 # restart a compose project from anywhere
tickle stop -p paperless            # stop that project

Run without arguments in a directory containing a compose file (docker-compose.yml, compose.yaml, container-compose.yml, etc.) and tickle restarts the whole stack: docker compose down && docker compose up -d.

Compose Projects by Name

-p/--project acts on a compose stack from any directory. Tickle finds it by the com.docker.compose.project label that compose puts on every container, reads the project's config files and working directory off the same labels, and runs the operation against those.

tickle -p paperless         # down + up -d
tickle start -p paperless   # up -d
tickle stop -p paperless    # down
tickle -f -p paperless      # restart, then follow the stack's logs

--project cannot be combined with service names. If the project is unknown, tickle lists the projects docker does know about.

Because stop runs down, it removes the very containers that carry the labels. Tickle therefore records each project's location in ~/.tickle/projects.tsv when it finds one, and falls back to that record when no containers remain — so tickle start -p paperless still works after a stop. Cache entries whose compose file has since disappeared are ignored.

Multi-service runs print a per-service summary and exit non-zero if any service failed.

History

Every operation is logged to ~/.tickle/history.log.

tickle history          # show full history
tickle history -n 10    # last 10 entries
tickle history stats    # totals, per-command breakdown, streaks
tickle history clear    # wipe it

Shell Completions

Completions cover subcommands, flags, and systemd service names; compose service names too when a compose file is present, and compose project names after -p/--project.

eval "$(tickle completions bash)"   # ~/.bashrc
eval "$(tickle completions zsh)"    # ~/.zshrc
tickle completions fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/tickle.fish

Development

cargo build
cargo test