Docs/Gateway/Keeping agents running
Gateway

Keeping agents running

4 min read

DevThrottle's promise is that you can look away without your agents stopping. This page is the honest map of how that works: which piece runs what, what keeps going when you close something, and what comes back after a reboot.

Three layers, three lifetimes

  • Viewers - the Cockpit in a browser, and your phone. Pure views. Open and close them as often as you like; nothing about your agents changes.
  • The Director - the desktop app that owns the agent sessions. The agent processes are its children: as long as the Director runs, your agents run, whether or not you are looking at any of it.
  • The Gateway - the always-on service that keeps everything reachable: by default DevThrottle's hosted Gateway, or one you run yourself. It does not run the agents itself; it serves the Cockpit and your phone, tracks the Directors on your machines, and sends the command that starts one when a scheduled run fires. On each machine a small Launcher - a tray app registered to start at login - holds the connection to the Gateway and starts and stops Directors when asked.
Note
The practical rule: walk away from the desk, close the browser, pocket the phone - agents keep working, and you can answer them from anywhere the Gateway is reachable. The Director window itself is the one thing to leave running.

Closing the Director

Because sessions live inside the Director, closing it ends them. Minimise the window rather than closing it.

Warning
Closing the Director ends the agent processes. Every change the agents made to your files stays - but in-flight work stops where it stands.

After a reboot

The Launcher registers itself to start at login (you can toggle that from its tray icon), so the machine comes back connected to the Gateway without any ritual. Everything the Gateway owns survives the restart: scheduled jobs and their run history, paired devices, and machine settings. Scheduled jobs recompute their next run time, and if a job fires when no Director is open, the Gateway has the Launcher start one - so unattended runs do not depend on you remembering to open anything.

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