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);
• restarts the service through a simple contract: the process exits with code 75, and your supervisor — systemd, PM2, or the bundled macOS shell — brings it back up.

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	just run pnpm dsh web again

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. 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 contract)

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.
• Restart — process exit code 75 means "restart requested". Anything else is a crash.
• State — persisted at ~/.dsh-self-update/update-state.json.

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

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