theway-daemon

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theway-daemon is the headless application kernel and the thewayd binary. It composes theway-core, theway-storage, theway-transport, theway-llm-provider, and theway-mcp into one long-running service.

The daemon owns session runtime assembly, model-facing tools, local and sandbox executor selection, hooks, triggers and cron jobs, nested-agent orchestration, MCP/LSP integration, telemetry export, and protocol-side behavior. It has no client-form or terminal-presentation concepts; theway-tui is one protocol client.

Entry points

• thewayd parses process options and calls the public run(DaemonOptions) composition entry point.
• DaemonPaths resolves the base, home, working directory, and additional skill directories once at startup.
• DaemonServices owns process-lifetime registries and command output injection.
• SessionRuntimeBuilder is the internal construction path for initial, resumed, and switched session runtimes; session-scoped runtime-extension startup context is owned by SessionExecutionContext.
• Public modules expose supported extension points for executors, hooks, storage adapters, tools, templates, skills, triggers, and TypeScript extensions; the extension host owns package discovery, trust, QuickJS isolation, capability brokers, reversible registrations, durable state projection, quiescent reload, and client-neutral diagnostics.

The execution environment is selected at runtime. [executor] kind = "local" | "sandbox" in config.toml is carried by theway-tui into the spawned daemon as --executor-kind (issue #123). local is the default and binds LocalExecutor; sandbox binds SandboxExecutor, whose unsupported operations fail with ExecutorError::UnsupportedKind, and omits the direct-OS tools. The protocol server can also forward ToolOps to a controller-provided gRPC tool endpoint.

The trigram-indexed grep backend is opt-out (issue #135): [tools] tgrep = false in config.toml is carried by theway-tui as --no-tgrep, which binds TgrepServerRegistry::disabled(). Every grep query then takes the in-process walker, and no tgrep serve process or .tgrep index is created. The setting is startup-only and appears in GetConfig.

The model catalog is controller-provisioned (issue #136). theway-tui parses [model] (provider, model, base_url, api_key, auto_fetch_models) and [[model.custom]] from config.toml and pushes them through the settings RPC; the daemon registers the descriptors before resolving a model and resolves api_key after provider environment variables and before auth.json. With auto_fetch_models = true the daemon imports GET <base_url>/models and fills an unset model id from the first entry. Headless equivalents are --api-key and --auto-fetch-models; the former models.json files are no longer read.

Running and validation

cargo run -p theway-daemon --bin thewayd -- --help
cargo test -p theway-daemon
cargo doc -p theway-daemon --no-deps --document-private-items

See the daemon architecture for startup, session, storage, tool, protocol, and observability ownership.