reticle restart

Free the bridge port and put a daemon back on it, reporting each half separately.

reticle restart is reticle kill followed by a daemon start that waits for a real bind.

npx @reticlehq/server restart [--port N] [--force]

Flags

Flag	Type	Default	What it does
--port N	number	4400 (or RETICLE_PORT, or the port in .reticle.json)	Which port to restart on
--force	boolean	false	Passed to the kill half: clear a listener that is not a Reticle daemon

The two halves are reported separately

A restart that killed the old daemon and then could not start a new one leaves you somewhere quite different from one that could not kill anything at all, and a single ok: false cannot tell you which happened. So each half prints its own line.

Real capture, restarting over a running daemon:

{"event":"reticle_killed","port":4499,"pid":84513,"escalated":false,"listenerIdentified":true,"note":"only the listener was signalled. Any `reticle mcp` proxy on this port holds a client connection, not the port, and was left alone — it goes dormant and starts a fresh daemon on the next tool call."}
{"event":"reticle_daemon_spawned","port":4499}

Real capture, when the port is held by something that is not ours:

{"event":"reticle_kill_refused","port":4498,"reason":"pid 84537 (\"Python\") is listening, and it is not a Reticle daemon — it never answered /status and it is not the pid Reticle recorded. Killing it would be killing someone else's process. Run it again with --force if that is what you meant, or start Reticle on another port.","holder":"Python"}
{"event":"reticle_restart_aborted","port":4498,"reason":"the port was not freed, so nothing was started — the old holder is still there"}

The start half is serve’s, which waits for the daemon to answer before claiming it started and exits non-zero when it does not. A restart never reports success for a daemon that never bound.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	The port was freed and a daemon is answering on it
1	The port was not freed, or the new daemon did not come up

Worked example

npx @reticlehq/server restart         # after an upgrade, so the new version is the one serving
npx @reticlehq/server status

Why not lsof

The pipeline everyone reaches for kills the agent’s own MCP proxy along with the daemon.