What is this?
If you run DeepSeek Harness from a git checkout (git clone + pnpm dsh web) — the way most self-hosted setups do — there is no built-in way to update it. Every release means manually running git pull, pnpm install, pnpm build, then restarting the service, and if anything breaks you dig out the old commit by hand.
dsh-self-update turns that whole cycle into a button. It is a harness plugin that:
- checks quietly in the background (every 6 h by default) and on demand, from the settings page or the macOS menu bar;
- shows a "new version" entry in the sidebar when there is something to install — clicking it opens an update panel with a version comparison and exactly the commands about to run;
- installs in one click:
git pull --ff-only → pnpm install → pnpm clean → pnpm build:official (official branding build), with live per-step progress — the clean step drops stale gitignored build output that would otherwise poison a large version jump (skipped gracefully on harness versions without a clean script);
- refuses to touch a dirty working tree — it will never discard your local changes;
- turns a diverged checkout into a guided exit instead of a dead end: the panel lists your local-only commits and offers one-click "back up & realign" — your commits are saved to a
local-backup-<timestamp> branch, the tree is hard-reset to the remote, and the update continues (refused while the tree is dirty);
- rolls back in one click if a step fails (and ships a CLI fallback for when the UI itself is down);
- notices a stale running process: it records the checkout's HEAD at startup, so once the code on disk moves ahead — its own install, your manual
git pull, any other tool — the UI says "Restart needed" instead of quietly serving new frontend on top of an old host;
- restarts the service through a simple contract: the process exits with code 75 for your supervisor (systemd, PM2, the bundled macOS shell) — and with no supervisor at all it respawns itself on macOS/Linux, so Restart now works even for a bare
pnpm dsh web in a terminal.
Not for you if you installed dsh via npm i -g @deepseek-ai/dsh: there is no git working copy to update, so this plugin hides itself entirely. Use an npm-based updater such as dsh-update-checker instead.
Install (any platform)
cd <your-deepseek-harness-checkout>
pnpm dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-self-update
Restart the dsh service once and you are done. No configuration needed — the plugin uses the process working directory as the harness checkout (override with the plugin config repoRoot if yours differs).
Closing the restart loop
The Restart now button makes the process exit with code 75 ("please restart me"). Teach your supervisor to honor it:
| Runner | Config |
|---|
| systemd | RestartForceExitStatus=75 |
| PM2 | autorestart: true (the default) |
| macOS shell (below) | built in |
| bare terminal / no supervisor | built in (self-respawn on macOS/Linux; manual on Windows) |
When no supervisor is detected, the plugin spawns a detached /bin/sh helper that waits for the old pid to die (freeing the port) and then re-execs the identical node command line — a bare pnpm dsh web, or an orphaned process, restarts itself. On Windows there is no such path: the button reads Stop service and you run pnpm dsh web again by hand. The panel always states which of the three will happen.
Detection reads DSH_SELF_UPDATE_SUPERVISOR first, then systemd's INVOCATION_ID, then PM2's pm_id/PM2_HOME. Set DSH_SELF_UPDATE_SUPERVISOR to any value (e.g. custom) when your supervisor already honors exit code 75 — otherwise the plugin self-respawns behind its back. none/0/false declare the opposite: nobody will restart me.
macOS shell (optional)
A native Swift + WKWebView app (no Electron) that owns the dsh service: click the icon to open the UI, closing the window keeps the service running, ⌘Q stops it. It adds a "Check for Updates…" menu item that opens the in-app update panel, and it automatically relaunches the service when it exits with code 75 (and marks it DSH_SELF_UPDATE_SUPERVISOR=macapp so the plugin leaves the restart to the shell). A server it merely adopted — one already listening on the port that the shell did not start — is now watched too: if it goes away, the shell waits up to 45 s for it to come back on its own and otherwise starts and owns a fresh one. Works with the browser-auth introduced in harness 0.1.2: the shell picks up the tokened URL the server prints at startup, so the embedded page signs in by itself.
node macapp/build-mac-app.mjs # requires Xcode command line tools
# outputs ~/Applications/DSH.app
First launch: right-click → Open (the app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized).
How it compares
| Updates | Platforms | Auto-restart |
|---|
dsh-update-checker | npm packages | restart is Windows-only | ✅ (Win) |
dsh-update-copilot | plugins; core is report-only | all | ❌ |
dsh-self-update | the harness git checkout itself | all (restart incl. macOS/Linux) | ✅ (exit-code 75; no supervisor needed on macOS/Linux) |
The exit-code-75 restart contract is the piece the community has been asking the harness core for (see upstream discussions #1231 and #2717) — this plugin is a working implementation of it.
Interface contract
- HTTP —
/self-update/api/update/{status,check,install,realign,rollback,restart}. Write routes require Content-Type: application/json and a local Origin (CSRF line of defense).
- Panel event — dispatch
dsh-self-update:open on window (detail: { check: true } to check immediately). This is exactly what the macOS menu item does via evaluateJavaScript.
- Runtime —
GET /update/status carries runtime: { pid, startedAt, sha, shortSha, stale, supervisor, restartMode }. stale = the HEAD on disk is no longer the one this process booted from (the UI treats it exactly like "installed, restart pending"); supervisor is macapp | systemd | pm2 | custom | none; restartMode is supervisor | self-respawn | manual.
- Restart —
POST /update/restart answers { ok, mode, exitCode } and exits ~300 ms later; mode is the restartMode above. Exit code 75 means "restart requested" — anything else is a crash. The browser then polls status and reloads only once a different pid answers (up to 120 s).
- State — persisted at
~/.dsh-self-update/update-state.json; the self-respawn helper's output at ~/.dsh-self-update/respawn.log.
When the UI is gone
If an update leaves dsh unable to boot (plugin/core seam breakage), the Web UI — rollback button included — is gone with it. Fall back to the CLI:
node scripts/rollback-harness.mjs # target = previousSha from the state file
node scripts/rollback-harness.mjs --sha <commit> # or pick a commit yourself
The updater records previousSha before every install precisely for this moment.
Development
Sibling layout, same as the rest of the dsh plugin ecosystem: this repo must be checked out next to deepseek-harness — the @deepseek-ai/* dev dependencies are link:../deepseek-harness/....
pnpm install
pnpm typecheck && pnpm test && pnpm build
The updater test suite runs against real (offline) git repositories; only the install/build commands are stubbed.
License
MIT
