Daemon

When you run interpreter, the launcher talks to a local app-server daemon rather than doing all the work in the foreground process. The daemon is what holds the running runtime; the interpreter command you type is a thin client that connects to it.

This is why the first launch after a reboot (or after the daemon has been stopped) is a little slower — it has to start the daemon — while every launch after that connects almost instantly.

Startup behavior

• Cold start — no daemon running yet. The launcher starts one and briefly shows a Starting up... status line while it comes up. As soon as the daemon is ready the line is cleared and the interface takes over.
• Warm start — a healthy daemon is already running. The client connects immediately and no startup line is shown.

The daemon is shared across every interpreter invocation on the machine, including interpreter exec. It stays running between sessions so repeated use stays fast.

Stopping the daemon

interpreter kill

This asks the daemon to shut down gracefully. If it does not exit on its own, force it:

interpreter kill --force   # or: interpreter kill -f

Stopping the daemon is safe — the next interpreter run simply cold-starts a new one.

Where the daemon lives

The daemon's runtime files live under your Open Interpreter home directory, which defaults to ~/.openinterpreter and can be overridden with the INTERPRETER_HOME environment variable:

The launcher validates the lockfile against the live process and probes the daemon's health endpoint before reusing it, so a stale lockfile left by a crashed daemon is detected and replaced automatically on the next launch.

Remote mode bypasses the local daemon

When you connect to a remote endpoint the local daemon is not involved:

interpreter --remote <ws-url>

See Server deployments for details.

Troubleshooting

• Launches feel stuck on Starting up... — check <home>/log/interpreter-app-server.log for startup errors.
• Something is wedged after an update or crash — run interpreter kill (add --force if needed) and relaunch to cold-start a fresh daemon.