/sethome on Feishu silently fails: nothing is persisted, prompt returns every startup

Summary

Running /sethome in a Feishu DM appears to succeed (the command returns the confirmation message), but the home channel is not actually persisted. After every gateway restart, Hermes prompts 📬 No home channel is set for Feishu. Type /sethome to make this chat your home channel... again.

I've run /sethome in the same Feishu DM at least 4 times over the past week (2026-04-20, 04-23, 04-27, 04-28) — every single time it prompts again on the next restart. Cron jobs and cross-platform messages never reach Feishu.

Environment

• Hermes version: 0.10.0 (reproduces on current main as well — I verified both code paths below)
• Platform: Feishu (self-hosted, websocket mode)
• OS: Ubuntu 25.10
• Python: venv managed

Root cause (two bugs)

Bug 1 — /sethome handler writes to config.yaml, but nothing actually lands there

gateway/run.py::_handle_sethome_command (line ~6379 on main, same on 0.10.0) tries to save via:

env_key = f"{platform_name.upper()}_HOME_CHANNEL"
config_path = _hermes_home / 'config.yaml'
user_config = {}
if config_path.exists():
    with open(config_path, encoding="utf-8") as f:
        user_config = yaml.safe_load(f) or {}
user_config[env_key] = chat_id
atomic_yaml_write(config_path, user_config)

The env_key is "FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL" (ALL_CAPS). After four /sethome calls on my install, inspecting ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

$ grep -i "home\|feishu" ~/.hermes/config.yaml
# (no output — the key is not present)

The file contains only model/memory/compression/session_reset/display sections — no top-level FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL key was written. (The existing config.yaml is a commented template shipped with the install; it may be that atomic_yaml_write is not re-serializing the merged dict, or comments/structure are getting in the way — I haven't dug further, but the observed outcome is: nothing is persisted.)

Logs confirm the inbound command fired every time:

2026-04-20 17:10:08 [Feishu] Inbound dm message ... text='/sethome'
2026-04-23 11:09:37 [Feishu] Inbound dm message ... text='/sethome'
2026-04-27 18:48:59 [Feishu] Inbound dm message ... text='/sethome'

Bug 2 — Even if config.yaml did contain FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL, startup would ignore it

gateway/config.py applies yaml_cfg → os.environ for several platforms (dingtalk, matrix, etc.) but has no such mapping for Feishu. Feishu's home channel is only read from the environment:

# gateway/config.py, line ~1170
feishu_home = os.getenv("FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL")
if feishu_home:
    config.platforms[Platform.FEISHU].home_channel = HomeChannel(...)

So the /sethome handler and the startup loader are out of sync for Feishu: the handler writes to yaml, but the loader only reads from env. Even if Bug 1 is fixed, Bug 2 means nothing takes effect until the user manually sets FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL in ~/.hermes/.env.

(This probably also affects other platforms where the yaml→env mapping is missing — I only verified Feishu.)

Reproduction

1. Fresh Hermes install with Feishu DM configured.
2. In Feishu DM, send /sethome. Observe ✅ Home channel set to ... confirmation.
3. systemctl --user restart hermes-gateway (or any restart).
4. Send any message in the DM. Observe the prompt: 📬 No home channel is set for Feishu. Type /sethome... returns.
5. grep FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL ~/.hermes/config.yaml — empty.
6. grep FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL ~/.hermes/.env — empty.

Workaround

Manually append to ~/.hermes/.env:

FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL=oc_your_chat_id_here

Then restart gateway. This works because the startup code path reads from env directly.

Suggested fix

Two orthogonal fixes:

Fix A — /sethome should write to .env (or a dedicated state file), not config.yaml.

config.yaml is a user-authored template with comments and structure; writing runtime state into it is fragile (and evidently broken). .env is the canonical env-var source and already is the source of truth for startup. A save_env_value("FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL", chat_id) call (Hermes already has this helper — it's used in the setup wizard at hermes_cli/gateway.py:2990) would work for all platforms uniformly.

Fix B — Add yaml→env mapping for Feishu (and audit others) in gateway/config.py.

If keeping yaml as a valid source, add the same pattern that exists for matrix/dingtalk:

feishu_cfg = yaml_cfg.get("feishu", {})
if isinstance(feishu_cfg, dict):
    if "home_channel" in feishu_cfg and not os.getenv("FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL"):
        os.environ["FEISHU_HOME_CHANNEL"] = str(feishu_cfg["home_channel"])

Fix A alone would resolve the immediate user-visible bug. Both together would make the config story consistent.

Additional context

Happy to send a PR for Fix A if maintainers agree it's the right direction. Let me know preferred approach (env vs yaml vs new state file).