dumb-init is a simple process supervisor and init system designed to run as PID 1 inside minimal container environments (such as Docker). It is deployed as a small, statically-linked binary written in C.

Lightweight containers have popularized the idea of running a single process or service without normal init systems like systemd or sysvinit. However, omitting an init system often leads to incorrect handling of processes and signals, and can result in problems such as containers which can’t be gracefully stopped, or leaking containers which should have been destroyed.

dumb-init enables you to simply prefix your command with dumb-init. It acts as PID 1 and immediately spawns your command as a child process, taking care to properly handle and forward signals as they are received.

Source: Yelp/dumb-init