Yelp/dumb-init

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

7303 stars · 355 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

dumb-init is a minimal init system and process supervisor designed to run as PID 1 inside Linux containers such as Docker. It is a small statically-linked C binary that spawns your command as a child process, properly forwards signals, and reaps orphaned zombie processes.

Use cases

• make docker containers stop gracefully on SIGTERM
• prevent zombie processes in containers
• run a single-process container without systemd
• fix docker run containers that ignore stop signals
• use as ENTRYPOINT wrapper in Dockerfiles
• treat docker containers like regular unix processes in CI

When to choose

• your container's main process doesn't handle signals properly
• you see defunct/zombie processes accumulating in a container
• you want a tiny, dependency-free PID 1 for minimal Docker images
• CI jobs leave containers running after docker run is killed

When to avoid

• you need a full init system with service management like systemd or s6
• your container already uses tini or another init via docker run --init
• you need process supervision with restart policies

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

cli developer-tools concurrency security developer-tools cloud-computing cli docker pid1 init-system signal-forwarding zombie-reaping containers devops linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="Yelp/dumb-init")