Attempt – A CLI for retrying fallible commands

In plain words

Attempt is a command-line tool for retrying commands that fail. It offers more comprehensive features than similar tools like wait-for-it.sh, making it useful for scenarios such as running database migrations in Docker Compose when services aren't ready yet. The tool can inspect error messages and selectively retry based on specific conditions. It's designed for developers who need reliable command execution with flexible retry logic.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

CLI for retrying fallible commands. Contribute to MaxBondABE/attempt development by creating an account on GitHub.

# Rerun database migrations if the server was not ready attempt --retry-if-contains " server not ready " sqlx migrate # Use an exponential backoff attempt exponential --retry-if-contains " server not ready " sqlx migrate What can I do with it? Wait for a service to start when you aren't restricted to bash Write robust scripts accessing resources which may become temporarily unavailable Bodge flaky programs into working Key features Simple. The featureset is small but flexible enough to covers most usecases. The codebase can be audited in an afternoon. Robust. It provides the tools you need to implement fault tolerance, like timeouts, jitter, and exponential backoff. The test suite is…from github.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN, Here's a tool I wrote for retrying fallible commands. Nothing groundbreaking here, this is a tool that's been made many times (and several have been submitted to Show HN). Though this one does have a more comprehensive feature set than most. I hope one or two people will find it useful. I wrote `attempt` for…

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