Daemon and thin-client sessions

Why grith optionally runs as a daemon, and what changes when it does.

The simplest way to use grith is one-shot per session: grith exec spawns the agent, supervises it, exits when the agent exits. That works fine for a single terminal, single agent, single user.

For everything else — multiple concurrent sessions, the dashboard, notification channels, team sync — there's the daemon. The daemon is a long-running grith process that owns the shared subsystems (audit, digest, reputation, server) and lets thin clients (each grith exec invocation) talk to them.

Daemon vs no daemon

Without the daemon:

grith exec -- claude

This:

Owns its own audit log file (under ~/.local/share/grith/audit/<session>.sqlite).
Runs its own filter pipeline.
Reviews go through grith digest review on the same terminal, or via TUI signal.
No HTTP API exposed, no dashboard.

With the daemon (grith daemon start):

grith exec -- claude
# Detects the daemon, registers as a thin-client session

This:

Sends syscall events to the daemon over a UNIX socket.
Audit log is the daemon's central SQLite database.
Digest is the daemon's central queue, reviewable from any terminal or the dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:3141.
Notification channels (configured once in the daemon) deliver review prompts.
Reputation table is shared across all sessions.

You can switch back and forth. A grith exec with no daemon running just falls back to standalone mode.

What the daemon owns

The server (crates/grith-server/) — REST API, WebSocket, dashboard.
The digest queue — single SQLite table, atomic decisions.
The audit database — central, indexed, retention-managed.
The reputation table — saved to disk every 5 minutes by default.
The notification dispatcher — owns channel state and rate-limit budgets.
The license — refreshed in-band on Pro plans.
The canary registry — same tokens visible to every session.

A daemon restart drops in-flight digest items if it's running in standalone mode (the process freeze in the thin client times out and auto-denies). On the Pro plan, restarts are clean — the daemon flushes pending state to disk before stopping and recovers it on start.

Thin-client sessions

When a daemon is running, grith exec becomes a thin client:

grith exec --profile claude-code -- claude

# Internally:
1. Connect to daemon UNIX socket
2. POST /ipc/sessions  → daemon assigns session id, returns config snapshot
3. fork + exec the supervised target, attach ptrace
4. On each interesting syscall, POST /ipc/proxy/evaluate with the call shape
5. Apply daemon's decision (allow / queue / deny)
6. On exit, DELETE /ipc/sessions/{id}

The supervisor (ptrace machinery) still runs in the thin-client process — it has to, because that's the process attached to the agent. But the filter pipeline runs in the daemon, which means scoring decisions can use global context (other sessions' recent behaviour, the central reputation table) that the thin client wouldn't have.

Starting and stopping the daemon

grith dashboard start   # background; prints connection details + opens/pairs the browser
grith dashboard status
grith dashboard pair     # (re)authorise a browser
grith dashboard stop

grith dashboard start spawns the daemon in the background and returns. It's also auto-started for you by grith run and grith exec (those instances idle-shut-down with the session; an explicit start persists until you stop it).

The daemon is local-only by default — binds to 127.0.0.1:3141. To expose it (for the dashboard from another machine, or for a webhook receiver), either configure [server.tls] with cert + key, or run a reverse proxy in front. See Reverse proxy & TLS.

When you'd not run a daemon

Single-user laptop, one terminal at a time, you're fine in standalone mode.
Containerised agents where each container is its own short-lived session.
CI runs where the agent runs once and exits.

When you'd want a daemon:

More than one supervised session in flight.
You want the dashboard.
You want notifications routed through Slack / Telegram / etc.
You're on Pro and using team policies / sync.

The auth model

The daemon binds loopback-only, but loopback reachability is not treated as authorisation:

IPC routes (/ipc/*, /server/shutdown) require the daemon bearer token (~/.config/grith/daemon.token, 0600), constant-time compared.
Browser routes require the per-server dashboard token — mutations and sensitive reads on every request, gated via the x-grith-csrf header (or ?token= for WebSockets). Low-sensitivity status stays open. The browser receives the token through the pairing flow, never the terminal.

Exposing beyond loopback additionally requires TLS (or a reverse proxy). For team setups, the Pro plan adds short-lived bearer tokens issued by the dashboard for cross-machine review. See Trust boundaries and Notification security.