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The daemon

piloop serve is the daemon. It starts the agents, scores the commits and enforces the limits of every project.
Without --detach, the daemon runs in the foreground. Ctrl-C stops it in the same way as piloop stop. Only one daemon runs for each PILOOP_HOME. The daemon holds a lock on serve.pid while it runs, so a second piloop serve refuses to start. The operating system releases the lock when the process ends, so a crash leaves nothing to clean up.

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Stop and restart

piloop stop stops the running agents:
  • The runs of the stopped workers fail with daemon stopped. This does not count as an attempt: the ideas go back to ready.
  • What each run made is pinned under refs/piloop/, with a note that its next attempt reads.
  • Requested agents stay requested, and start when the daemon starts again.
  • The sessions of the stopped agents are not attached to Entire.
piloop restart keeps the agents running. The daemon stops its loop, and the same process starts the installed code again, with the same pid and environment. The new daemon connects to every running agent again and finishes its run as if nothing happened. The timeout of each agent still counts from its start. A daemon that starts after a crash does the same: it connects again to the agents that are still running.

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Under a service manager

piloop service-unit prints a unit file for your service manager. It installs nothing.
The unit restarts the daemon when it fails. It sets PILOOP_HOME and your current PATH, because the daemon must find the harness CLIs on its PATH. Set PILOOP_SECRETS_COMMAND before you run piloop service-unit, and the unit includes it. See Secrets. Under a service manager:
  • Start and stop the daemon with the service manager.
  • piloop stop stops the daemon until the service manager starts it again.
  • Do not use piloop serve --detach: it starts a second daemon that the service manager does not control, once the first one has stopped.
  • piloop restart and piloop upgrade keep the daemon under the service manager, because the restart happens in the same process.
  • After you change the unit file, restart with the service manager: systemctl --user restart piloop.

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Logs and traces

The daemon writes one line for each span and span event to stderr. With --detach, stderr goes to ~/.piloop/serve.log. Set OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT to also send the spans to an OpenTelemetry collector. The events table holds what happened to each row, and is the easiest record to query: