hermes-manual-update-and-report

Hermes manual update and maintenance report

Use this when Hermes is installed from a local git checkout and the normal hermes update path is unreliable, blocked by command approval, or reports stale status after updating.

When to use

• hermes --version says an update is available
• hermes update hangs, times out, or triggers approval errors
• the user wants a daily self-maintenance job for Hermes
• you need a report covering both update status and cron job health

Key experiential findings

1) hermes update may fail even when approvals are allowed

In this environment, hermes update triggered approval-path failures and the user saw:

• Command Approval Required
• Error 200340

Even after the user chose Always, the wrapper path was still unreliable.

Conclusion: when this happens, do not keep retrying hermes update. Switch to the manual repo update flow.

2) Manual update flow works reliably

For a repo checkout at ~/.hermes/hermes-agent, use:

cd ~/.hermes/hermes-agent
git fetch origin main
git rev-parse --short HEAD
git rev-list --left-right --count HEAD...origin/main

Interpretation:

• output like 0 182 means local is behind upstream by 182 commits
• output 0 0 means already current

If behind > 0, run:

git pull --rebase origin main
./venv/bin/python -m ensurepip --upgrade --default-pip
./venv/bin/python -m pip install -e '.[all]'

This matched Hermes' own update logic closely enough to complete the upgrade successfully.

3) pip may be missing inside the venv after update attempts

A real failure encountered:

• ./venv/bin/python: No module named pip

Fix it with:

./venv/bin/python -m ensurepip --upgrade --default-pip

Then rerun the editable install.

4) Version banner can stay stale after a successful update

After updating to the latest git commit, hermes --version still showed:

• Update available: 182 commits behind — run 'hermes update'

But git verification showed: