nesquena/hermes-webui v0.50.285

v0.50.285 — same-day hotfix: session recovery actually fires

on GitHub

[v0.50.285] — 2026-05-03

Fixed (1 PR — same-day hotfix-of-hotfix)

• Session recovery scanner crashes on _index.json (silent no-op in production) (closes #1558 follow-up) — v0.50.284's startup self-heal (api/session_recovery.py:recover_all_sessions_on_startup) crashed on the very first *.json it scanned in the production session directory. The session dir contains an _index.json file whose top-level shape is a list (the index of session metadata dicts), not a dict. _msg_count() did data.get('messages') which raises AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'get'. The broad except Exception in server.py's startup hook swallowed the error and printed [recovery] startup recovery failed: 'list' object has no attribute 'get', so the recovery silently no-op'd for every user — defeating the entire purpose of the v0.50.284 startup self-heal. Verified live on the production server immediately after the v0.50.284 deploy: log line confirmed the failure, no recovery attempted. Fix: (1) _msg_count() now guards if not isinstance(data, dict): return -1 so non-dict-shaped JSON files return the harmless "unknown count" sentinel instead of raising. (2) The scanner skips any file whose name starts with _ (the existing project convention for non-session metadata files like _index.json). (3) The scanner now wraps recover_session(path) in try/except Exception so a single malformed file can't break recovery for the rest. 2 new regression tests in tests/test_metadata_save_wipe_1558.py: test_recover_all_sessions_on_startup_skips_non_session_index_json and test_msg_count_returns_neg1_for_non_dict_top_level. Net effect: any user wiped between v0.50.279 and v0.50.284 deploys whose session left a .bak will now get auto-recovered on first launch of v0.50.285, as v0.50.284's release notes promised.

Tests

4026 → 4028 passing (+2 from the 2 new regression tests). 0 regressions. Full suite in 114s.

Pre-release verification

• All 8 tests in tests/test_metadata_save_wipe_1558.py pass (6 original + 2 new regression).
• Live verification on production server: pre-fix log line [recovery] startup recovery failed: 'list' object has no attribute 'get'. Post-fix expected log: [recovery] Restored N/M sessions from .bak (see #1558). (or empty scan if no .bak files).
• Pre-release Opus advisor pass on the hotfix.

Why this needed a same-day v0.50.285 vs being deferred

v0.50.284 promised that "the first server start after deploying v0.50.285 will auto-restore any session that was wiped between deploys." That promise was broken by the _index.json shape mismatch — the recovery silently never fired. Affected users (the original reporter on v0.50.282 with the 1000+ message session that disappeared) would have had <sid>.json.bak files on disk but those files would never be processed. Same-day hotfix restores the promise.