"hawser" command errors - flags, status

[Radarrrr-blip]

Hi there. I just migrated from Portainer to Dockhand; incredible work, and thanks for putting so much effort in to this project.

I was rebuilding a poor-man's CI/CD pipe and found a few interesting quirks-
Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.73+deb13-amd64
Architecture: x86-64-v2

Installation method: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Finsys/hawser/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Issue: hawser status - command doesn't register changes to config file; looks like it's a wrapper for the systemctl status, but is either getting cut off or not reading the output. Restarting hawser service registers the config changes (ex. Standard to Edge); no changes to hawser status state after service reload.
Syntax: hawser status -> config [changes] -> systemctl restart hawser -> hawser status
Expected: on config change, hawser status shows updated status.
Workaround: 'systemctl status hawser' shows expected output (ex. server / connection status when switching from Standard to Edge) once system is reloaded.

Issue: --flags not working
This was annoying- flags and flag variants weren't setting properly, returning an error message. Also confirmed that config did not take changes on flag changes - needed to update config manually.
Syntax: hawser --[flag] [arg].
Expected: write flags update appropriate vars in config file.
Workaround: edit config manually, restart hawser.

Apologies if you already had a bead on these.

[jotka]

hi @Radarrrr-blip

Hi, thanks for the kind words and for reporting this!

hawser status: Hawser doesn't have a status subcommand — if you're running systemctl status hawser, that shows the running process state, which is expected behavior. Config changes require a service restart to take effect, same as nginx/postgres/any systemd service:

sudo vi /etc/hawser/config
sudo systemctl restart hawser

CLI flags: The binary reads configuration from environment variables (sourced from /etc/hawser/config by the systemd unit). CLI flags like --port or --server don't exist — the "Manual run" examples at the end of the install script are incorrect and I'll fix that.

For manual testing, you'd do:

TOKEN=secret PORT=2376 hawser standard

Or for edge mode:

DOCKHAND_SERVER_URL=wss://... TOKEN=your-token hawser

I'll update the install script to fix the misleading help text. The intended workflow is: edit /etc/hawser/config → restart the service.

[Radarrrr-blip]

Thanks @jotka - glad this was just a help text issue.