The first iteration of this PR did docker stop on every cleanup in
persist mode (only skipping docker rm). Ben caught this as
contradicting the documented "ONE long-lived container shared across
sessions" semantics: stopping the container on every Hermes /quit kills
any background processes inside (npm watchers, pytest watchers,
long-running scripts) — exactly the case persist mode is supposed to
protect.
This commit splits the cleanup paths cleanly:
* **Persist mode (default)** — cleanup() is a NO-OP for the
container. Container stays running, processes survive, next Hermes
process attaches via the existing label probe in ~ms instead of
waiting for docker start. Resource reclamation happens via the
orphan reaper at next startup (2 × lifetime_seconds threshold), which
covers the SIGKILL / OOM / abandoned-laptop cases.
* **Opt-out mode (persist_across_processes=False)** — unchanged:
docker stop + docker rm -f on cleanup as before.
* **Explicit teardown** — new cleanup(force_remove=True) kwarg
overrides persist mode and tears the container down unconditionally.
cleanup_vm(task_id) now defaults to force_remove=True since
it's the user-driven reset path (called from AIAgent.close(),
/reset-style flows, and the idle reaper's per-turn cleanup).
The idle reaper in _cleanup_inactive_envs calls env.cleanup()
directly with no kwargs, so idle persist-mode envs are no-op'd — the
container survives the in-process pop and the next tool call re-probes
via labels. No state leak: _container_id is still cleared on the
in-process handle.
E2E verified against real Docker:
✓ Container is still running after cleanup()
✓ Background process (sleep loop) survived cleanup()
✓ Filesystem state preserved across cleanup()
✓ In-process container_id cleared (next __init__ will re-probe)
✓ Background process visible from reused env (no docker start happened)
✓ force_remove=True removed the container even in persist mode
✓ cleanup_vm() removed the container (defaults to force_remove=True)
Test changes:
* Replaces `test_cleanup_with_persist_only_stops_no_rm` with
`test_cleanup_with_persist_is_noop_for_container` — asserts neither
stop nor rm runs in persist mode, and the in-process handle is
cleared so re-probe works.
* Adds `test_cleanup_force_remove_stops_and_rms_even_in_persist_mode`
— covers the new kwarg.
* Updates `test_cleanup_uses_subprocess_run_not_detached_shell` and
`test_wait_for_cleanup_after_cleanup_returns_true` to pass
`force_remove=True` so they actually exercise the docker code path
(default no-op would trivially pass).
cleanup_vm() forwards `force_remove` only to backends whose cleanup()
accepts the kwarg (currently just DockerEnvironment) via runtime
signature inspection — Modal/Daytona/SSH `cleanup()` signatures are
unchanged.
Refs #20561
5c2170a7c6