crash-guard-dsh

The most frustrating part of using third-party plugins in PawWork is not missing features but a single bad plugin dragging the entire startup chain into a crash loop. The host restarts, fails, restarts again, and manual triage is painfully slow. crash-guard-dsh is built for exactly this pain point: it loads with the highest bundle priority, performs a state check before any other plugin runs, and if it detects that the previous session crashed or hung during loading, it writes an auto-disable entry into the user-level patch file so the host can boot cleanly.

The core capability is a three-layer self-healing architecture. Layer one is an in-process 50 ms poll that tracks every plugin load and persists state to disk in real time. Layer two is a detached watchdog child process that handles the case where the event loop is completely blocked (infinite loops, synchronous I/O), triggering a process kill, plugin disable, and restart when the heartbeat goes stale for over 30 seconds. Layer three is manual recovery as the final fallback. Safety guardrails ensure the guard never disables itself or core packages, disables only one plugin per incident, and uses re-entrance locks plus freshness checks to avoid false positives during live reload. It is zero-config, ready to work the moment you install it.

Who is it for? Anyone who has installed plugins in PawWork and experienced a single bad plugin causing repeated crashes or hangs will see the value immediately. Install it once and it silently handles the rest, reducing triage effort from minutes to zero.