hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix macOS: Telegram gateway lock always has start_time=null, causing PID reuse false positives

Bug

On macOS, _get_process_start_time() in gateway/status.py always returns None because it reads from /proc/<pid>/stat, which only exists on Linux. As a result, the Telegram bot token scoped lock file always records "start_time": null.

When the gateway crashes or exits without cleaning up the lock file, the stale detection logic falls back to os.kill(pid, 0). If another unrelated process later reuses the same PID (e.g. a system app), it is mistakenly treated as a live Hermes gateway. The lock is never cleared, and the new gateway fails to connect to Telegram with:

ERROR [Telegram] Telegram bot token already in use (PID ). Stop the other gateway first.

The only recovery is to manually delete the stale lock file at: ~/.local/state/hermes/gateway-locks/telegram-bot-token-*.lock

Root cause

_get_process_start_time() has no macOS fallback. On macOS, start_time is always null in lock records, so the PID-reuse guard never activates.

Fix

Add a macOS fallback using ps -p <pid> -o lstart= and parse the output to an epoch integer:

def _get_process_start_time(pid: int) -> Optional[int]:
    # Linux: read from /proc filesystem
    stat_path = Path(f"/proc/{pid}/stat")
    try:
        return int(stat_path.read_text().split()[21])
    except (FileNotFoundError, IndexError, PermissionError, ValueError, OSError):
        pass

    # macOS fallback: parse lstart from ps
    try:
        import subprocess
        from datetime import datetime
        out = subprocess.check_output(
            ["ps", "-p", str(pid), "-o", "lstart="],
            stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL,
            text=True,
        ).strip()
        if out:
            normalized = " ".join(out.split())
            dt = datetime.strptime(normalized, "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y")
            return int(dt.timestamp())
    except Exception:
        pass

    return None

Environment

- macOS 15.4
- Python 3.11

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