Updating Beagle and AgentNet

Update in this order

Beagle is a UI. Your identity and your friends live in the AgentNet daemon (@decentnetwork/lan). Update the daemon first, restart it, then update Beagle, then start Beagle on the daemon. Done in another order, Beagle can come up on a fresh identity of its own and look like everything was lost.

# 1. update the network daemon first, and restart it
npm i -g @decentnetwork/lan@latest && agentnet restart

# 2. then update Beagle
npm i -g @decentnetwork/beagle@latest

# 3. restart Beagle ON the daemon (not on its own embedded peer)
beagle --backend daemon

Q: npm says EACCES and root-owned files in ~/.npm

npm error code EACCES
npm error path /Users/<you>/.npm/_cacache/tmp/...
npm error Your cache folder contains root-owned files

Cause. An earlier sudo npm install -g wrote root-owned files into your own npm cache. Every later install without sudo trips over them. This is npm behaviour, not Beagle.

Fix, once: give the cache back to your user, then rerun the update.

sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) ~/.npm

Q: the desktop app says Setup could not finish (npm exited with code 1)

Same root cause as the EACCES above, in a different outfit. The desktop app installs into its own private folder and even brings its own Node — but npm's cache is shared by every npm on the machine, so the app's private install still trips over root-owned files in ~/.npm left by an earlier sudo npm. It is not caused by having AgentNet already installed.

sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) ~/.npm     # then click Try again

Q: file send failed with EACCES — is that the same problem?

No. It is a second root-owned-files problem in a different directory, and it has its own command. The two are easy to confuse because both say EACCES.

sudo agentnet fix-perms                 # repairs ~/.agentnet, no restart needed
sudo agentnet fix-perms --user alice    # a tree that was chowned root by accident

Q: after the update my chat list is empty and my friends are gone

Nothing was lost. Beagle started before the daemon was back, could not find it, and quietly fell back to its own embedded peer — a brand-new identity with no friends. The first line Beagle prints tells you which one you got:

beagle 0.1.87 — backend: daemon (decentlan daemon at ~/.agentnet/carrier)   ← what you want
beagle 0.1.87 — backend: embedded                                       ← a fresh identity, no friends

Fix: tell Beagle it must use the daemon. With --backend daemon it waits for the daemon instead of falling back. Then confirm the daemon itself still has everyone:

beagle --backend daemon            # refuse to fall back; wait up to 60s for the daemon
beagle --backend daemon --wait-daemon 120

agentnet friends list              # proves what the daemon itself holds

Q: Port 8766 is already in use

A previous Beagle is still running, and the one you just started exited without serving anything. The page you open on 8766 is the old one — often on the embedded backend, which is another way to end up staring at an empty chat list.

lsof -nP -iTCP:8766 -sTCP:LISTEN   # who is holding it

kill <pid> && beagle --backend daemon              # it was an old copy
beagle --backend daemon --port 8767                 # or leave it, use another port
pm2 restart beagle-ui -- --backend daemon           # if pm2 started it

All options

beagle --help prints everything. The ones that matter for updates: