dsh-plugin-reload

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A DeepSeek Harness plugin that gives the agent a reload_plugin tool: restart exactly one Cordis Loader entry — matched by entry id, module name, or MCP serverName. Every other entry keeps running.

Two reload strategies are chosen per entry kind:

• mcp-client entries respawn the MCP server child process on restart (picking up new server code on disk) and re-register its tools; sibling MCP connections are not affected.
• in-process plugin entries get a hard reload: the Node ESM/CJS module caches for the entry and its local source files are busted, the entry is re-imported from disk, and its fibers are swapped onto the fresh module — the same technique cordis-plugin-hmr's partial reload uses. Plugin code changes take effect without restarting the host, and a failed re-import or re-apply rolls back to the previous code.

Built on the "everything is a plugin" architecture of DeepSeek Harness. The official repository does not accept external pull requests at the moment — per CONTRIBUTING.md, community plugins are published independently and shared under the dsh-plugin topic.

Install (auto-mount)

Since v0.1.2 the package declares a dsh.bundle, so a single command installs the plugin and automatically mounts it:

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-plugin-reload

What happens under the hood:

1. dsh plugin runs pnpm add inside the profile directory (~/.dsh/profiles/<name>/).
2. On success it reconciles the profile manifest: because dsh-plugin-reload declares dsh.bundle in its package.json, it is appended to the profile's dsh.profile.bundles layer list.
3. On the next harness start the bundle layer is composed, and the plugin's own cordis.patch.yml inserts the plugin-reload entry — the tool appears in the model's tool list with no manual patch editing.

To pick up a later version:

dsh plugin --profile web update dsh-plugin-reload

Freshly published versions may be held back briefly by pnpm's minimumReleaseAge supply-chain policy; an explicit version (dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-plugin-reload@0.1.x) bypasses it.

Manual mount (alternative)

If you install the package with plain npm (not via dsh plugin), or prefer an explicit patch row, add it to your profile patch (~/.dsh/profiles/<name>/cordis.patch.yml, or a --patch overlay):

- insert:
    - id: plugin-reload
      name: 'dsh-plugin-reload'

Restart the harness (or let profile-patch HMR pick it up). Keep either the bundle mount or the manual row — not both (a duplicate tool registration fails at load).

Usage

reload_plugin accepts:

Argument	Required	Meaning
name	yes	Entry id (preferred), module name, or MCP config.serverName of the entry to reload
mode	no	auto (default) — hard reload for in-process plugins, fiber restart for mcp-client; soft — dispose and re-apply only (never picks up in-process code changes); hard — bust ESM/CJS caches and re-import the entry code from disk
dry_run	no	true reports the single matched entry and the strategy that would run, without restarting it

Matching walks the Loader's non-group entries once: exact entry id first, then module name, then mcp-client serverName. Zero matches fail with a bounded list of available entries; multiple matches fail listing the candidate entry ids and change nothing. Group entries never match — restarting a subtree requires one call per leaf entry.

A successful reload returns the entry id, module, optional serverName, previous and current fiber phases, the strategy used, and a semantics note. A hard reload writes nothing back to the loader config: the entry's options stay untouched, only its fiber is swapped onto the re-imported module.

Requirements

• A DeepSeek Harness profile with the web (or headless) bundle, i.e. the standard dsh runtime with @deepseek-ai/dsh-tools and @deepseek-ai/cordis-plugin-loader available.

Known limitations

• Brief tool outage during reload — the reloaded entry's contributions (e.g. MCP tools) are unregistered between disposal and re-application; in-flight calls to those tools fail.
• No group reload — restarting a whole plugin subtree must be requested per leaf entry.
• Hard reload covers the plugin's own code only — dependencies in node_modules (e.g. @deepseek-ai/*, ws) are intentionally not re-imported; changing those still requires a host restart. Module-level state of the reloaded plugin is re-evaluated (a fresh import), so plugins must not rely on top-level persistent state surviving a reload.
• Agent-facing only — no browser/UI surface; the Settings plugin-inventory tab stays read-only.

Development

npm install        # dev deps (types + typescript) from npm
npm run build      # tsc → lib/
npm test           # vitest
npm pack           # inspect the tarball before publishing

License

MIT