dsh-plugin-restart

A Restart card in DeepSeek Harness Settings. One click replaces the dsh web process that is serving your page — and the page reconnects by itself. No terminal, no re-opening the desktop icon.

That matters because some changes cannot hot-reload:

• you changed a plugin's host half, and Node caches imported ES modules by URL;
• you edited config.json, the port, or the workspace;
• a session holds in-memory state you want gone.

Today those mean walking back to a terminal. This plugin turns them into one click.

Try it

dsh plugin --profile web add github:chenkui-luo/dsh-plugin-restart

Then refresh the page once and open Settings → Restart.

Without the dsh CLI (no pnpm, or a patched profile): copy the package into <profile>/node_modules/dsh-plugin-restart and add this row to <profile>/cordis.patch.yml:

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

The bundled installer does both steps with a backup and a read-back check before it writes:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\Install-RestartPlugin.ps1
powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\Install-RestartPlugin.ps1 -Action disable
powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\Install-RestartPlugin.ps1 -Action uninstall

What happens when you click

Nothing is force-killed in the middle of the response, and the old process is stopped last, by itself. A restart that fails leaves a diagnosis in the log instead of failing silently.

Why the helper is a detached node process

This part was measured on a real Windows machine, not assumed:

On Windows a "detached" PowerShell child gets no console and never runs the script — the same trap dsh-market documents. An attached helper dies together with the process it is supposed to replace. So the helper is a detached node process, and it gives its own children a hidden console through powershell -WindowStyle Hidden.

Force-killing the whole tree is the other half of the story: it leaves a Windows port unbindable long enough for the replacement to die with EADDRINUSE. Waiting for the port to go quiet and only then starting the replacement is what makes the handover reliable.

Verified, not asserted

The end-to-end runs cover: the installer writing a managed patch row, the host half claiming its routes, an unauthenticated request being fenced off, the restart being accepted before the port goes away, a second click inside the guard window being refused, the port wait, the launcher handover, the successor process appearing, and the page noticing it.

These live in the toolkit this plugin was built in; this repository is the packaged plugin.

API

Every route passes the connection trust fence (loopback peer + matching Origin + login cookie), so only an authenticated same-origin page can reach them.

If the automatic reload comes back unauthenticated — a fresh launch token is minted on every start — the page's own token is handed back to the same browser connection once, so it can reopen itself with ?token=….

Logs

%LOCALAPPDATA%\DeepSeekHarness\restart-plugin\logs\restart.log — append-only, so the record of a restart survives the process that performed it. The helper writes the launcher's exit code, whether the port is still being served, and whether a fresh token file appeared, because the process that would normally log a failure is the one that just exited.

Configuration

Restart target. By default it delegates to the launcher a hosted install already has (%LOCALAPPDATA%\DeepSeekHarness\Launch-DeepSeekHarness.ps1), which owns the reliable stop/start/readiness sequence. When that file is missing the button reports a clear error instead of pretending to work, and the status card shows the path it looked for. Making the plugin fully standalone is the next step on the roadmap.

Safety

• Authenticated same-origin loopback only; proxy-forwarded requests are not honoured.
• No admin rights, no system configuration touched.
• It interrupts a running conversation turn — that is what a restart is, and the card says so.
• If the port is owned by a process the launcher does not recognise (a dsh web you started by hand), the restart takes that port over, including its terminal's process tree.

Credits

• DeepSeek Harness (dsh) — the open-source agent harness this plugin extends and is built on: its dsh.bundle + cordis.patch.yml declaration, the dual host/browser plugin shape, and the webserver's trust fence. deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness · MIT.
• dsh-market — the community plugin market. Its restart.js is the reference for the approach used here: delegate to a detached helper, wait for the port instead of guessing with a fixed delay, and make a failed restart leave evidence.

License

MIT