The relaunchd project provides a service management daemon that is similar to the original launchd introduced in Apple OS X.

It is not limited to the original features of launchd, however; interesting work is being done to add support for launching programs in jails, passing socket descriptors from the host to a jail, and launching programs within a preconfigured Capsicum(4) sandbox. Additionally, relaunchd uses UCL for its configuration files, so jobs can be defined in JSON or other formats that UCL supports.

While there is still work to be done, most of the important features of the original launchd have been implemented, and relaunchd has been made available in the FreeBSD ports tree. It should still be considered experimental and not ready for production use, but everyone is welcome to try it, report issues, and contribute code or ideas for improvement.