shep is a process manager written in Rust. One binary runs a daemon called the shepherd, which keeps a flock of your long-running processes alive, restarts them when they die, captures what they print, and says plainly when something is wrong.
It also restarts on file changes, on a cron schedule, or over a memory limit, ships a terminal dashboard, and can alert a webhook when a process misbehaves.
Three things it will not do on Windows. shep startup is not built, because boot-time supervision there means a Service Control Manager service rather than another unit template. There is nothing SIGTERM-shaped that can be delivered to an arbitrary process, so shep stop waits out the process's whole kill_timeout unless the app opts into the shepherd channel. The user and group Flockfile fields refuse permanently.
Only shep.exe is linked onto PATH. The archive also carries shep-runtime.exe and shep-dev.exe, which are container entrypoint aliases with no desktop use case.
Yes. shep is free and open-source software released under the MIT OR Apache-2.0 license.
What is the latest version of shep?
The latest version is 0.1.25, released on Sep 1, 2026.
Is it safe to download shep?
The download button links to the official installer published on github.com, the same file Windows Package Manager installs. You can verify the downloaded file by comparing its SHA-256 checksum with f504675394903e71407e7cb157dcf3c12ea061b4b6c3081231c0820418ad84d1.
Which Windows versions does shep support?
shep runs on Windows and is available for 64-bit (x64) systems.
How do I uninstall shep?
Open Settings › Apps › Installed apps, find shep and select Uninstall. From the command line, run winget uninstall --id=shep-pm.shep -e.
Is there a portable version of shep?
Yes. shep is available as a portable ZIP archive (shep-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip, 64-bit (x64)) that runs without installation. Copy it to any folder or USB drive and run it from there.
Alternatives to shep
Other Programming Languages programs for Windows from different developers.