Show HN: Procinsh – A 3D Linux process inspector

A web-based process inspector for Linux. Like Ghost in the Shell, you can wander through process space with your ghost.

Requires Linux x86-64. Both installation methods compile native code and require Rust, a C compiler, clang with the BPF backend, bpftool, pkg-config, libelf and zlib development files, and BTF information at /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux.

Support on WSL2 is very limited, I recommend building procinsh from source rather than installing it from crates.io. I haven't tested it in container environment such as Docker.

Install procinsh from crates.io and run it:

(Sorry, we assume you are using Ubuntu, please reinterpret not so)

sudo apt-get install --yes --no-install-recommends
build-essential clang llvm pkg-config libelf-dev zlib1g-dev python3
linux-tools-common linux-tools-generic cargo install procinsh --locked

Then run and open http://127.0.0.1:9090 in your browser. To allow remote access, use --allow-non-loopback, but be careful: this exposes process memory and environment variables without any authentication.

sudo "$HOME/.cargo/bin/procinsh" --listen 127.0.0.1:9090

If you don't want to use sudo, please use setcap instead of it.

sudo setcap
cap_sys_ptrace,cap_bpf,cap_perfmon,cap_dac_read_search=ep
"$HOME/.cargo/bin/procinsh" "$HOME/.cargo/bin/procinsh" --listen 127.0.0.1:9090

Self build

Also requires Node.js 22 or newer with npm and Rust via rustup. The Rust version and components are pinned in rust-toolchain.toml; rustup installs them automatically when needed.

Clone this repository and run the following from its root:

sudo apt-get install --yes --no-install-recommends
build-essential clang llvm pkg-config libelf-dev zlib1g-dev python3
linux-tools-common linux-tools-generic npm ci npm run build:web cargo build --release --locked

Then run:

sudo ./target/release/procinsh --listen 127.0.0.1:9090

Building on WSL2 (Ubuntu)

Ubuntu's bpftool wrapper may fail with bpftool not found for kernel ... because the WSL2 kernel version differs from the Ubuntu tools package. Set BPFTOOL to the packaged executable directly, bypassing the wrapper:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install --yes --no-install-recommends
build-essential clang llvm pkg-config libelf-dev zlib1g-dev python3
linux-tools-common linux-tools-generic for tool in /usr/lib/linux-tools/*/bpftool; do if [ -x "$tool" ]; then export BPFTOOL="$tool" break fi done "${BPFTOOL:?No packaged bpftool found; install linux-tools-generic}" version "$BPFTOOL" btf dump file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux format c >/tmp/procinsh-vmlinux.h npm ci npm run build:web cargo build --release --locked

Then run:

sudo ./target/release/procinsh --listen 127.0.0.1:9090

Now, where shall I go? The process space is vast.