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 Digit 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 Digit 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.digit.gateway-<name>.plist) or systemd user service (digit-gateway-<name>.service). This guide adds the patterns for managing them collectively.

Quick start

# Create profiles (once)
digit profile create coder
digit profile create personal-bot
digit 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:

digit config set gateway.multiplex_profiles true
digit gateway restart

Equivalently, in the default profile's ~/.digit/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 digit 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 digit 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 that skips the entire secondary profile while the default and other healthy profiles continue. The warning names the skipped profile and every conflicting platform:

Skipping secondary profile 'coder' due to port-binding config error: Profile
'coder' enables port-binding platform(s) webhook, but gateway.multiplex_profiles
is on. ... Remove these platform entries from profile 'coder's config.yaml or
configure them only on the default profile.

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

Authentication follows the profile named in the URL. Unprefixed endpoints keep using the default listener's existing credentials.

• /p/coder/... API-server requests must use API_SERVER_KEY from ~/.digit/profiles/coder/.env; the default listener key is rejected.
• A webhook route that targets coder must declare profile: coder beside its existing route-specific secret in the default profile's config.yaml. That secret is then accepted only at /p/coder/webhooks/<route> and is rejected on every other profile prefix.
• Webhook routes without profile remain default-profile routes and are not reachable through a named profile prefix.

Keep port-binding platforms disabled in secondary profile configs. The shared listener and its route definitions stay on the default profile; profile binding controls which profile each authenticated webhook route may execute. Named API requests fail closed when the target profile has no API_SERVER_KEY.

Only this shared-listener conflict degrades to a skipped profile. Security configuration errors remain fatal: for example, an open own-policy platform without GATEWAY_ALLOW_ALL_USERS or its platform-specific allow-all opt-in still aborts gateway startup rather than silently dropping the unsafe profile.

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). digit status reports the multiplexer and the profiles it serves; digit 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.

Routing shared-bot chats to profiles (profile_routes)

Multiplexing selects a profile per credential (each profile's own bot token) or per URL prefix (/p/<profile>/ for HTTP platforms). When several communities share one bot token — for example one Discord bot serving many guilds — you can additionally route specific guilds/channels/threads to different profiles with gateway.profile_routes:

gateway:
  multiplex_profiles: true
  profile_routes:
    # An entire Discord server → one profile
    - name: acme-server
      platform: discord
      guild_id: "1234567890"
      profile: acme

    # One channel in that server → a different profile
    - name: acme-support
      platform: discord
      guild_id: "1234567890"
      chat_id: "9876543210"
      profile: acme-support

    # A Telegram group (no guild concept — chat_id only)
    - name: tg-group
      platform: telegram
      chat_id: "-1001234567890"
      profile: tg-profile

Routes are matched most-specific-first (thread_id > chat_id > guild_id), all declared fields must hold (AND), and a route keyed on a channel also matches threads/forum posts whose parent is that channel. Messages that match no route stay on the default/active profile. The routed profile gets the full per-profile isolation described above (config, skills, memory, credentials, session namespace). Routing works on every platform adapter, not just Discord.

profile_routes requires gateway.multiplex_profiles: true; with multiplexing off the routes are ignored. If a route names a profile that does not exist on disk, the gateway logs a warning naming the profile and source and falls back to the default home.

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/digit-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: digit-gateways {start|stop|restart|status|list}"
}

run_for_profile() {
  profile="$1"
  action="$2"
  if [ "$profile" = "default" ]; then
    digit gateway "$action"
  else
    digit -p "$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)
    digit gateway list
    ;;
  *)
    usage
    exit 2
    ;;
esac

Then:

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

提示

The default profile is targeted with digit gateway <action> (no -p), not digit -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 digit -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.digit.gateway-<profile>.plist
Linux	~/.config/systemd/user/digit-gateway-<profile>.service

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

Viewing logs

Each profile writes to its own log files:

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

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

Stream every profile's log simultaneously:

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

The CLI also has a structured log viewer:

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

Identify what's actually running

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

Editing configuration

Every profile keeps its config inside its own directory:

~/.digit/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 ~/.digit/ directly with the same three files.

Edit them with any editor or via the CLI:

digit 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:
digit-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 ~/.digit/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

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=digit --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 digit-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' \
     ~/.digit/.env ~/.digit/profiles/*/.env

Updating the code

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

digit update
digit-gateways restart

User-modified skills are never overwritten.

Troubleshooting

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

You ran digit gateway start after a previous digit 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 "digit_cli.*-p <profile>"
cat ~/.digit/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.digit.gateway-<profile>.plist
launchctl load   ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.digit.gateway-<profile>.plist

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

Health check

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