hermes-agent/website/docs/user-guide/multi-profile-gateways.md

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Running Many Gateways at Once

Operate multiple profiles — each with its own bot tokens, sessions, and memory — as managed services on a single machine. This page covers the operational concerns: starting them all together, viewing logs across profiles, preventing the host from sleeping, and recovering from common launchd/systemd quirks.

If you only run one Hermes agent, you don't need this page — see Profiles for the basics.

When to use this

You want this setup when you have two or more Hermes agents that should all be online at the same time. Common reasons:

• A personal assistant on one Telegram bot and a coding agent on another
• One agent per family member or one per Slack workspace
• Sandbox + production instances of the same configuration
• A research agent + a writing agent + a cron-driven bot — each with isolated memory and skills

Every profile already gets its own per-platform LaunchAgent (ai.hermes.gateway-<name>.plist) or systemd user service (hermes-gateway-<name>.service). This guide adds the patterns for managing them collectively.

Quick start

# Create profiles (once)
hermes profile create coder
hermes profile create personal-bot
hermes profile create research

# Configure each
coder setup
personal-bot setup
research setup

# Install each gateway as a managed service
coder gateway install
personal-bot gateway install
research gateway install

# Start them all
coder gateway start
personal-bot gateway start
research gateway start

That's it — three independent agents, each on its own process, restarting automatically on crash and on user login.

Alternative: one gateway for all profiles (multiplexing)

The model above runs one process per profile. That is the default and is the right choice for most setups. But on a host with many profiles — or a container deployment where one process per profile is operationally heavy — you can instead run a single multiplexing gateway: the default profile's gateway becomes the sole inbound process and serves messages for every profile on the box.

This is opt-in and off by default. When it's off, nothing on this page changes — every behavior below is inert.

When to prefer multiplexing

• A container/VPS deployment where N supervisor units, N ports, and N PID files are a burden.
• Many low-traffic profiles that don't each justify a full process.
• You want a single thing to start, monitor, and restart.

Stick with one-process-per-profile when you want hard process-level isolation between profiles (separate memory footprints, independent crash domains, the ability to restart one profile without touching the others).

How to opt in

Set the flag on the default profile (it owns the multiplexer) and restart its gateway:

hermes config set gateway.multiplex_profiles true
hermes gateway restart

Equivalently, in the default profile's ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

gateway:
  multiplex_profiles: true

(The flag is also accepted as a top-level multiplex_profiles: true for convenience.) On the next start the default gateway enumerates every profile, brings up each profile's enabled platforms under that profile's own credentials, and routes each inbound message to the profile it belongs to. Each turn resolves the routed profile's config, skills, memory, SOUL, and provider keys — credentials are never shared across profiles.

You do not run hermes gateway start for the secondary profiles — the default gateway serves them. See the contract changes below.

What changes when multiplexing is on

Enabling the flag changes how a few things behave. All of these revert the moment the flag is off.

1. Secondary profiles must not start their own gateway

With a multiplexer running, a named-profile hermes gateway start / run is a hard error, pointing you back at the multiplexer:

The default gateway is running as a profile multiplexer and already serves
profile 'coder'. ...

The multiplexer is the single inbound process; a second profile gateway would double-bind that profile's platforms. Pass --force only if you deliberately want a separate process for that profile (not recommended while the multiplexer is running). The cross-profile lifecycle wrapper script earlier on this page is therefore not used in multiplex mode — you only manage the default gateway.

2. HTTP-inbound platforms are reached via a /p/<profile>/ URL prefix

Webhook (and other HTTP-inbound) traffic for a secondary profile arrives on the default listener under a profile prefix, not a second port:

# default profile
POST http://host:8644/webhooks/<route>
# the "coder" profile, same listener
POST http://host:8644/p/coder/webhooks/<route>

An unknown or unconfigured profile in the prefix returns 404. Because the one shared listener already serves every profile this way, a secondary profile must not enable a port-binding platform itself — doing so is a config error and the gateway refuses to start, naming the profile and platform:

Profile 'coder' enables the port-binding platform 'webhook', but
gateway.multiplex_profiles is on. ... Remove platforms.webhook from profile
'coder's config.yaml (configure it only on the default profile).

Port-binding platforms covered by this rule: webhook, api_server, msgraph_webhook, feishu, wecom_callback, bluebubbles, sms. Configure any of these only on the default profile; every profile is reachable through its /p/<profile>/ prefix.

3. Per-credential platforms still need their own token per profile

Polling/connection platforms (Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, Signal, …) work fine multiplexed, but each profile that enables one must supply its own bot token — the same token cannot be polled by two profiles at once. If two profiles configure the same (platform, token), startup fails fast naming both profiles (see Token-conflict safety — the rule is unchanged, it's just enforced inside the one process now).

4. Session keys are namespaced by profile

Each profile's sessions live under an agent:<profile>:… namespace so two profiles on the same platform/chat never collide in the shared session store. The default profile keeps the historical agent:main:… namespace byte-for-byte, so existing default-profile sessions are unaffected — no migration, no orphaned history.

5. One PID/lock and one status surface

There is a single process-level PID and lock (the multiplexer, under the default home). hermes status reports the multiplexer and the profiles it serves; hermes status -p <name> slices to one profile. Each profile still writes its own runtime_status.json under its own home, so existing per-profile readers keep working.

What does not change

Per-profile .env credential isolation is preserved and, if anything, stricter: a profile's keys are resolved from its own scope and are never unioned into a shared environment (this also means subprocesses like MCP servers and Kanban workers only ever see their own profile's secrets). Kanban, profile-scoped skills/memory/SOUL, and model routing all behave per-profile exactly as they do with separate gateways.

Start, stop, or restart all gateways at once

The CLI ships with single-profile lifecycle commands. To act across every profile, wrap them in a shell loop. Put the snippet below in ~/.local/bin/hermes-gateways and chmod +x it:

#!/bin/sh
set -eu

# Add or remove profile names here as you create / delete profiles.
profiles="default coder personal-bot research"

usage() {
  echo "Usage: hermes-gateways {start|stop|restart|status|list}"
}

run_for_profile() {
  profile="$1"
  action="$2"
  if [ "$profile" = "default" ]; then
    hermes gateway "$action"
  else
    hermes -p "$profile" gateway "$action"
  fi
}

action="${1:-}"
case "$action" in
  start|stop|restart|status)
    for profile in $profiles; do
      echo "==> $action $profile"
      run_for_profile "$profile" "$action"
    done
    ;;
  list)
    hermes gateway list
    ;;
  *)
    usage
    exit 2
    ;;
esac

Then:

hermes-gateways start      # start every configured profile
hermes-gateways stop       # stop every configured profile
hermes-gateways restart    # restart all
hermes-gateways status     # status across all
hermes-gateways list       # delegates to `hermes gateway list`

:::tip The default profile is targeted with hermes gateway <action> (no -p), not hermes -p default gateway <action>. The wrapper above handles both forms. :::

Manage one profile

The shortcut commands every profile installs:

coder gateway run        # foreground (Ctrl-C to stop)
coder gateway start      # start the managed service
coder gateway stop       # stop the managed service
coder gateway restart    # restart
coder gateway status     # status
coder gateway install    # create the LaunchAgent / systemd unit
coder gateway uninstall  # remove the service file

These are equivalent to hermes -p coder gateway <action> — useful if a profile alias is not on PATH or if you target profiles dynamically from a script.

Service files

Each profile installs its own service with a unique name, so installations never clash:

Platform	Path
macOS	~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.hermes.gateway-<profile>.plist
Linux	~/.config/systemd/user/hermes-gateway-<profile>.service

The default profile keeps the historical names: ai.hermes.gateway.plist / hermes-gateway.service.

Viewing logs

Each profile writes to its own log files:

# Default profile
tail -f ~/.hermes/logs/gateway.log
tail -f ~/.hermes/logs/gateway.error.log

# Named profile
tail -f ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/logs/gateway.log
tail -f ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/logs/gateway.error.log

Stream every profile's log simultaneously:

tail -f ~/.hermes/logs/gateway.log ~/.hermes/profiles/*/logs/gateway.log

The CLI also has a structured log viewer:

hermes logs -f                  # follow default profile
hermes -p coder logs -f         # follow one profile
hermes logs --help              # filters, levels, JSON output

Identify what's actually running

hermes profile list             # profiles + model + gateway state
hermes-gateways status          # full status across every profile
launchctl list | grep hermes    # macOS — PIDs and labels
systemctl --user list-units 'hermes-gateway-*'   # Linux — units

Editing configuration

Every profile keeps its config inside its own directory:

~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/
├── .env              # API keys, bot tokens (chmod 600)
├── config.yaml       # model, provider, toolsets, gateway settings
└── SOUL.md           # personality / system prompt

The default profile uses ~/.hermes/ directly with the same three files.

Edit them with any editor or via the CLI:

hermes config set model.model anthropic/claude-sonnet-4    # default profile
coder config set model.model openai/gpt-5                  # named profile

After editing .env or config.yaml, restart the affected gateway:

coder gateway restart
# or, for everything:
hermes-gateways restart

Keeping the host awake

The gateway process can run all day, but the operating system will still try to sleep when idle. Two patterns:

macOS — caffeinate

caffeinate is built into macOS and prevents sleep while it runs. No install.

caffeinate -dis                    # block display, idle, and system sleep
caffeinate -dis -t 28800           # same, auto-exit after 8 hours
caffeinate -i -w $(cat ~/.hermes/gateway.pid) &   # awake while default gateway runs

# Persistent: run in background and forget
nohup caffeinate -dis >/dev/null 2>&1 &
disown

# Inspect / stop
pmset -g assertions | grep -iE 'caffeinate|prevent|user is active'
pkill caffeinate

Flag	Effect
-d	block display sleep
-i	block idle system sleep (default)
-m	block disk sleep
-s	block system sleep (AC-powered Macs only)
-u	simulate user activity (prevents screen lock)
-t N	auto-exit after N seconds
-w P	exit when PID P exits

:::warning Lid-close still sleeps the Mac caffeinate cannot override the hardware-driven lid-close sleep on MacBooks. For lid-closed operation, change your Energy Saver / Battery preferences or use a third-party tool. :::

Linux — systemd-inhibit or loginctl

# Inhibit suspend while a command runs
systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep --who=hermes --why="gateways running" \
  sleep infinity &

# Allow user services to keep running after logout (recommended)
sudo loginctl enable-linger "$USER"

After enabling lingering, your systemd user units (including hermes-gateway-<profile>.service) continue running across SSH disconnects and reboots.

Token-conflict safety

Each profile must use unique bot tokens for each platform. If two profiles share a Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, or Signal token, the second gateway refuses to start with an error naming the conflicting profile.

To audit:

grep -H 'TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN\|DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN' \
     ~/.hermes/.env ~/.hermes/profiles/*/.env

Updating the code

hermes update pulls the latest code once and syncs new bundled skills into every profile:

hermes update
hermes-gateways restart

User-modified skills are never overwritten.

Troubleshooting

"Could not find service in domain for user gui: 501"

You ran hermes gateway start after a previous hermes gateway stop. The CLI's stop does a full launchctl unload, which removes the service from launchd's registry. The CLI catches this specific error on start and automatically re-loads the plist (↻ launchd job was unloaded; reloading service definition). The service starts normally. Nothing to fix.

Stale PID after a crash

If a profile's gateway shows not running but a process is still alive:

ps -ef | grep "hermes_cli.*-p <profile>"
cat ~/.hermes/profiles/<profile>/gateway.pid
kill -TERM <pid>          # graceful
kill -KILL <pid>          # if that fails after a few seconds
<profile> gateway start

Forcing a hard reset of one service

# macOS
launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.hermes.gateway-<profile>.plist
launchctl load   ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.hermes.gateway-<profile>.plist

# Linux
systemctl --user restart hermes-gateway-<profile>.service

Health check

hermes doctor                  # default profile
hermes -p <profile> doctor     # one profile