Service Management

Moltis can be installed as an OS service so it starts automatically on boot and restarts after crashes.

Install

moltis service install

This creates a service definition and starts it immediately:

The launchd and systemd configurations:

• Start on boot (RunAtLoad / WantedBy=default.target)
• Restart on failure with a 10-second cooldown
• Log to ~/.moltis/moltis.log

On Linux, Moltis first uses systemd --user when it is available. Some development containers, including Coder/devbox environments, do not run systemd or provide the SysV service command. In those environments, moltis service install falls back to a small user-owned supervisor script in ~/.moltis/. The fallback starts Moltis in the background, records pid files, supports status, stop, restart, and restarts Moltis after crashes.

The portable supervisor is tied to the current container session. If the workspace container is recreated, configure your devbox/Coder startup hook to run moltis service restart after installing Moltis.

Options

You can pass --bind, --port, and --log-level to bake them into the service definition:

moltis service install --bind 0.0.0.0 --port 8080 --log-level debug

These flags are written into the service file. The service reads the rest of its configuration from ~/.moltis/moltis.toml as usual.

Manage

moltis service status     # Show running/stopped/not-installed and PID
moltis service stop       # Stop the service
moltis service restart    # Restart the service
moltis service logs       # Print the log file path

To tail the logs:

tail -f $(moltis service logs)

Uninstall

moltis service uninstall

This stops the service, removes the service file, and cleans up.

CLI Reference

How It Differs from moltis node add

moltis service install manages the gateway — the main Moltis server that hosts the web UI, chat sessions, and API.

moltis node add registers a headless node — a client process on a remote machine that connects back to a gateway for command execution. See Multi-Node for details.