Rhyolite — turning scripts into tools
I have a folder of scripts that do critical things. I got tired of forgetting how to run them.
Every dev I know has a scripts graveyard. Bash snippets, Python utilities, random Rust binaries. Stuff that matters, but you only run it once in a while, then forget how it works.
Rhyolite is my fix for that. It's a local desktop app that wraps your existing scripts in typed, documented, rerunnable tools, and lets you chain them together. No rewriting scripts. No framework. No cloud.
The core idea
The contract is intentionally tiny.
Rhyolite passes params in as env vars.
Your script writes output to a JSON result file.
Exit code 0 means success.
That's it.
In return you get a generated parameter form, proper run history with exact inputs, and clean stdout/stderr logs.
Chains
The part I care most about is chaining.
Most "workflows" are really just 2-3 scripts run in order where output from one feeds the next.
Usually that logic only exists in your head or in some old comment like # run extract.py first.
Rhyolite makes that wiring explicit. You map output fields to downstream input params. If one task fails, chain stops. No magic, just less guesswork.
What it isn't
It's not a scheduler. It's not a cloud orchestrator. It's not replacing your scripts. Your scripts stay as real files on disk; Rhyolite just gives them a usable interface.
Status
Still building. v1 is tasks, systems, basic chains, and a graph view so you can see what touches what. No drag-and-drop yet. That's v2 if the core proves useful.
If you've ever spent 40 minutes figuring out how to safely rerun one script, this is for you.