dsh-autorestart

Restart DeepSeek Harness without losing the work that is currently running.

Chinese version: README.zh.md

Current version: 0.9.4

What it does

Three small things, all around restarting.

1. The restart is queued. An agent asks for a restart; the plugin does not cut off the conversations that are still running. It waits until every one of them is idle, restarts the host, and picks the interrupted work back up — the sessions resume and a goal is re-armed. When several conversations ask at once the requests are merged into one restart, and every requester is woken afterwards. A goal-carrying session cannot block the restart forever: its goal is disarmed before the restart (the running round still finishes) and re-armed after it.

2. It backs up before each restart. The configuration and the local link: plugin directories are saved under ~/.dsh/storages/dsh-autorestart/backups/. At most maxBackups copies are kept (default 2, range 2–10); old and incomplete ones are pruned. A snapshot that cannot be removed (for example because a file inside it is locked) is reported in backupHygiene.error rather than silently kept, so the count can briefly exceed the limit.

3. It clears the login cookies. Every launch leaves a dsh-auth-* entry behind; they pile up until the request header overflows (~16 KB), the server answers 431, and the client can only say Web authentication failed. The plugin clears those stale credentials before each restart and records the outcome in last-cookie-clear.json.

There is also a countdown shutdown: a moon button at the bottom of the sidebar waits for every conversation to finish, counts down on screen, and powers the machine off.

What it does not do

• It does not watch the host and does not decide whether a restart came back.
• It does not restore anything on its own. The backup is never applied automatically; it is there for you to inspect or roll back by hand. The one exception is the start-at-login supervisor, if you installed it: that separate process rolls the last snapshot back when the host refuses to start.
• There is nothing left to run by hand. If the host will not start, use its own crash dialog or reinstall the plugin.

Tools for the agent

Tool	What it does
continuum_restart	Queue a graceful restart (waits for every conversation to be idle)
continuum_status	Phase, generation, queued requests, which sessions are blocking
continuum_cancel_restart	Withdraw a queued request (scope: "mine" or "all")
continuum_park_goal	Disarm a goal so a queued restart can proceed
continuum_recover_now	Retry post-restart recovery immediately
continuum_handoff	Hand an over-limit session off to a fresh one
continuum_supervisor	Inspect or install the self-starting supervisor

Configuration

The settings page writes these; the defaults are the ones in the code.

Key	Default	Meaning
restartMode	app	app = ask the desktop client to relaunch itself; command = run your own restart command
restartCommand	''	The command used when restartMode is command; supports the {pid}, {ppid} and {app} placeholders
settleMs	2000	How long the host must stay quiet before the restart may start
restartGraceMs	0	Extra wait after the last conversation went idle, before the host is really restarted — a dropdown: 0 / 5 / 10 / 20 / 30 / 60 seconds. 0 = no extra wait
queuedGraceMs	60000	How long a queued inbox message may sit before it stops blocking the restart. A running conversation always blocks
forceRestartWhenBusy	false	Interrupt a running conversation instead of waiting. The default never interrupts a session
deferPollMs	3000	Poll interval while waiting for the conversations to go idle
relaunchDelaySeconds	2	How long the detached helper waits before it kills the app
backupOnRestart	true	Take a snapshot before every restart
backupIncludePlugins	true	Include the locally linked plugins in that snapshot (~117 MB here, ~3 s). false keeps only the configuration files
maxBackups	2	How many snapshots to keep (2–10)
restartCommandTimeoutMs	30000	How long the restart command may run before the plugin stops waiting for it
showSleepButton	true	Show the countdown-shutdown button
sleepCountdownSeconds	20	Countdown length before powering off — a dropdown: 0 / 10 / 20 / 30 / 60 seconds
sleepCommand	''	Override the power-off command
resumeOnBoot	true	Resume interrupted sessions after a restart
recoveryDelayMs	6000	Wait before the first resume attempt
maxResumeAttempts	2	Resume attempts per session, counted across boots
maxSessions	4	How many sessions are resumed per boot
continuationText	''	Override the continuation prompt text
stateFile	''	Path of the checkpoint file. Empty = <DSH_HOME>/storages/dsh-autorestart/state.json
autoReloadPage	true	Reload the web page after a restart
blockManualRestart	true	Refuse an agent that tries to kill or relaunch DSH by hand, and point it at continuum_restart instead
healthPath	/__dsh_autorestart/health	Health check route: the boot id, the pid, the phase and the self-check flags
enabled	true	Turns the whole plugin off
watchEnabled	true	The plugin watch: after the host settles, compare what the loaded plugins provide with the previous reading and report what is no longer there. A report, not an automatic repair
watchDelayMs	8000	How long the watch waits after boot before it reads
deferSoftMs, deferHardMs, deferPolicy	300000 / 900000 / auto	Deprecated — read but completely ignored. A pending restart has no deadline

The settings page

Four groups, all reachable from the settings page:

Group	What is in it
Restart settings	The wait before the restart, the two backup switches, the backup limit, and the list of the snapshots — each with its time and a button that rolls back to that one copy
Shutdown settings	The countdown of the graceful shutdown
Start at login	How "start at login" works on this machine, with copyable commands. The plugin never changes your system configuration for you
Something is wrong	The diagnostics and a Report a problem button that copies them and opens a pre-filled GitHub issue. The diagnostics carry no access token and no secrets

Where it writes

Path	What
~/.dsh/storages/dsh-autorestart/state.json	Boot generation, phase, per-session restart state
~/.dsh/storages/dsh-autorestart/backups/<stamp>/	config/ + node_modules-link/ of one snapshot
~/.dsh/storages/dsh-autorestart/last-cookie-clear.json	How many credentials the last clear removed
~/.dsh/storages/dsh-autorestart/access.json	The loopback port and token the plugin listens on

About that backup

It holds the configuration files (package.json, cordis.patch.yml, pnpm-lock.yaml) and the local link: plugin directories. Plugins installed from npm are not in it — they can be reinstalled from package.json + pnpm-lock.yaml. So it is good for "what did this look like before" and "put this one plugin version back", not a one-click reinstall.

Platforms

Platform	Status
Windows desktop client (restartMode: app)	Verified on the real machine
Hosted dsh web on WSL with systemd (restartMode: command)	Verified on a real instance
Hosted dsh web on Windows	Not verified
WSL without systemd, native Linux	Not verified

macOS, a remote SSH session without a graphical session and containers are out of scope — not tested, and not supported. The per-capability matrix is in docs/platform-matrix.md.

Install

From npm:

dsh plugin install dsh-autorestart

From source:

git clone https://github.com/Eason-22/dsh-autorestart.git
cd dsh-autorestart
dsh plugin --profile desktop add /absolute/path/to/dsh-autorestart

Inside DSH the equivalent is the plugin_manager tool:

plugin_manager install_bundle  target = <absolute path to the package>

The plugin needs no configuration to work: the defaults queue restarts, take a snapshot before each one, and clear the stale cookies.

Uninstall

Remove the dsh-autorestart row from your profile's bundle list — in the Plugin Manager of the UI, or with the dsh plugin CLI:

dsh plugin remove dsh-autorestart

The snapshots under ~/.dsh/storages/dsh-autorestart/backups/ are yours; they are not deleted for you.

Tests

The plugin ships its own test suite in plugins/dsh-autorestart/test/. Run it with the bundled Node:

node --test plugins/dsh-autorestart/test

All 939 test cases pass (939 passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped).

License

MIT