Technology · Framework

ratatui

A terminal console over my execution substrate's Redis control plane, for watching function services and steering them.

FAFO Core and Function ForgeA terminal operator consoleRust · crossterm
A terminal console · reads direct, acts through the front door Refreshed from Redis every second

Watching the substrate from a terminal

FAFO Core and Function Forge runs functions as services whose state lives in Redis. I wanted to watch and steer them from a terminal without opening a browser, so I had a small Rust console built on ratatui and crossterm. A dashboard view rolls the estate up into totals, and a services view lists every active service with its resources; arrow keys and function keys move between them, and a detail view for one service adds its recent control-plane log lines.

dashboard: the estate in totals

services: CPU and memory per active service

detail: one service and its recent control-plane log lines

Illustrative values. Rendering reads a model refreshed on the tick, so the screen never waits on a slow query.

Steering through the front door

Reads go straight to Redis, but every change the console can make is an MCP tool call to the control plane through the authenticated gateway, and nothing is sent until the operator confirms it in a popup. The control plane those calls reach is described on the FAFO Core and Function Forge page, and the gateway's sign-in on the Auth and access plane page.

The console has no control path an agent lacks.

CJ
scale, batch, stop, restartgatewaycontrol plane
AI
the same tool callsgatewaycontrol plane

I build small operator tools on the same rules as the platform they watch. ratatui and crossterm are third-party; the console, its views and its use of the control surface are mine, and the depth is in the substrate it steers.