Foreman is a process manager commonly used during development of multi-component applications. For production, it allows allow you to either run your application directly or export it to some other process management format (i.e. init system service files).

Foreman uses a file called Procfile, which is the same mechanism for declaring what commands are run by your application’s dynos on the Heroku platform. It follows the process model. You can use a Procfile to declare various process types, such as multiple types of workers, a singleton process like a clock, or a consumer of the Twitter streaming API.