Getting started with doctor

Install doctor, check it is watching, and prove it heals. Written for anyone, not just the person who builds the stack.

#It installs with the stack

The apiary installer sets doctor up automatically, including registering it with your operating system so it survives crashes and reboots.

macOS or Linux:

curl -fsSL https://get.theapiary.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://get.theapiary.sh/install.ps1 | iex

Prefer to be your own on-call? Add --no-doctor to skip it.

#Where to look first

Run doctor status in your terminal. This shows daemon health, service state, versions, when it last healed something, and your opt-out flags. If you only remember one command, remember this one.

doctor status

#Prove it heals

Kill a daemon on purpose, wait about half a minute, and check again. It comes back on its own, with a fresh note of the last repair.

pkill -f honeycomb
sleep 30
doctor status

#The status page

doctor serves a human-readable status page on your machine at http://127.0.0.1:3852. It works even when everything else is down, which is exactly when you need it. The same data is available as a machine-readable feed at /status.json.

#Install or update it on its own

You don't have to reinstall the whole stack to get doctor. Install or update it by itself, then register the OS service:

npm install -g @legioncodeinc/doctor
doctor install-service

doctor registers per user, so there's no sudo prompt on macOS or Linux and no admin prompt on Windows.

#Turning it off

doctor uninstall-service

This removes the OS registration cleanly. The rest of the stack keeps running; you're just back to being your own on-call.

#What next

• Read the common questions in the doctor FAQ.
• See every command in the command reference.
• Understand the design in How doctor works.

#Common questions

Do I need to install doctor separately? No. It installs with the apiary stack by default. Add --no-doctor at install time if you want to skip it and be your own on-call.

How do I know it's actually watching? Run doctor status. It shows daemon health, service state, and when doctor last healed something.

How do I prove it heals something? Kill a daemon on purpose (pkill -f honeycomb), wait about 30 seconds, and run doctor status again. It should show the daemon healthy with a fresh heal timestamp.