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Lifeline

The Lifeline is a persistent Telegram connection that supervises your agent’s server. It runs outside the server process, so it can detect crashes and recover automatically.

What It Does

Section titled “What It Does”
  • Auto-recovery — If the server goes down, the Lifeline restarts it
  • Message queuing — Messages received during downtime are queued and delivered when the server comes back
  • First-boot greeting — Your agent greets you on Telegram in its own voice the first time it starts
  • Lifeline topic — Created during setup with a green icon, dedicated to agent health

Commands

Section titled “Commands”
Terminal window
instar lifeline start    # Start lifeline (supervises server, queues messages)
instar lifeline stop     # Stop lifeline and server
instar lifeline status   # Check lifeline health

Why a Separate Process?

Section titled “Why a Separate Process?”

The server runs inside tmux and can be killed, crash, or hit resource limits. The Lifeline runs as a separate Node.js process (or via instar autostart as a system service) that monitors the server and brings it back if it goes down.

Without the Lifeline, a server crash means silence until you notice. With it, the agent self-heals and queues messages so nothing is lost.