Daemon

The daemon is the local control plane: the controller manager (control loops that boot workstations, deliver the in-VM agent, and forward the Docker socket) plus an optional HTTP API. The Ringleader desktop app starts one for you. These commands let you run and control it directly.

Bare rl daemon (no subcommand) runs in the foreground; rl daemon start detaches it into the background.

rl daemon                # run in the foreground
rl daemon start          # start detached in the background
rl daemon start --foreground   # explicit foreground form
rl daemon status         # is one running?
rl daemon restart        # stop, then start a fresh one
rl daemon stop
rl daemon log-level debug   # raise the log level, kept across restarts

Subcommands

Flags

These apply to start/restart (and bare daemon):

rl status

Report which workstation providers this machine can use, and why a provider cannot be used when it cannot.

rl status
rl status -o json     # the same, to branch on in a script

Each local provider, such as vz, lima, qemu, wsl2 or hcs, and each cloud provider is reported as one of:

The local answer is the daemon’s last check of this machine. With no daemon ever run here, rl status checks the machine itself and says so.

The cloud answer comes from your organization’s CloudAccount objects on the control plane you are signed in to. It checks no cloud credential and makes no call to any cloud. Only an org administrator can read those objects, so for anyone else each cloud shows unknown. When you are not signed in, each cloud shows unavailable.

In the text form, the provider a new workstation lands on when it names none ends with “default for new workstations that name no provider”. In the JSON form, that provider carries "default": true and no other provider carries default. A report where no provider carries default does not say which one is the default. That is the case when rl status checks the machine itself, and for a report from an older daemon. Do not read a missing default as “this machine has no default”.

A provider that runs a workstation only when the workstation names it, with provider: <name>, carries "namedOnly": true in the JSON form. On Windows, while hcs is the default, wsl2 is named-only: the text form leaves the wsl2 row out, and the JSON form keeps it. The hcs provider says more about what this means.

If the daemon runs edge VMs on this machine, the report lists each one. It shows the Edge each one serves, its workstations, and whether it is running and serving.

Inspecting a running daemon

cat  ~/.ringleader/daemon.pid     # the live daemon's pid (absent ⇒ none running)
tail -f ~/.ringleader/daemon.log  # provisioning, agent-delivery and configuration logs

Running as an administrator on Windows

On Windows, start the daemon from an ordinary terminal, not one opened with Run as administrator. Every process the daemon starts runs with its rights, including the network process that carries each hcs workstation’s traffic. So rl daemon, rl daemon start and rl daemon restart refuse to run as an administrator. They print this line and exit 1:

daemon: refusing to run as an administrator. Start it from a terminal that was not opened with "Run as administrator".

A refused rl daemon restart leaves the running daemon running. When a daemon is already running, rl daemon start prints rl daemon: already running (pid N) and exits 0, even from an administrator terminal.

If UAC is off, or you sign in as the built-in Administrator account, Windows gives your account only administrator rights, so the daemon runs as an administrator. rl daemon status then says so:

  elevated: yes: this daemon runs as an administrator, the only token this account has (UAC is off, or it is the built-in Administrator)

To run the daemon as an administrator anyway, set RINGLEADER_ALLOW_ELEVATED_DAEMON=1 in the terminal you start it from. Only the value 1 allows it, and the refusal names any other value. The daemon then logs a warning when it starts, and rl daemon status prints:

  elevated: yes: this daemon runs as an administrator; restart it from a terminal not opened as administrator: rl daemon restart

When you next start the daemon from an ordinary terminal, it replaces each hcs workstation’s network process that a daemon running as an administrator started. The SSH sessions open to those workstations drop once.