AppGuard

Cross-platform C++ library for application instance management and inter-process communication.

Overview

AppGuard provides a simple yet powerful solution for managing application instances and enabling communication between processes. Whether you're building a desktop application that should only run once, or need to pass data between multiple instances of your program, AppGuard has you covered. Disclaimer: While this library has an IPC mechanism, it is only for data exchange between app instances. It is not ment to be a robust IPC implementation. If you want a stable IPC solution, use an other library that can handle IPC more efficiently.

Key Features

Single Instance Management

• Automatically detect if another instance of your application is already running
• Configurable behavior: quit immediately or handle manually
• Cross-platform mutex-based implementation

Inter-Process Communication

• Send messages between application instances
• Callback-based message handling
• Support for structured message routing
• Thread-safe message delivery

Cross-Platform Support

• Windows (Win32 API)
• Linux and macOS (System v messages. Unix based implementation)

Language Bindings

• Native C++ API
• Python bindings with Pythonic interface
• Consistent API across languages

Use Cases

Desktop Applications

Ensure your GUI application only runs one instance, and bring the existing window to focus when users try to launch it again.

Command-Line Tools

Forward command-line arguments from secondary instances to the primary instance for processing.

Building

Fork this repo

git clone https://github.com/still-standing88/app-guard

Install requirements, AppGuard requires SCons,, setuptools, and pybind11 to build with python bindings

pip install -r requirements.txt
scons

Documentation

Documentation can be found here

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

• GitHub: @still-standing88
• Project: app-guard