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microagent halt

Last updated: 2026-06-11

microagent halt <name> [--state-dir <dir>]

halt is the normal way to park a workspace: it requests a clean shutdown and records the terminal state as halted. The VM process exits, but the rootfs, attached disks, identity, and event timeline remain under --state-dir, so a later microagent start <name> boots the same disk state. Reach for stop when you want to signal a misbehaving VM rather than park a healthy one, and kill only when stop doesn’t return.

This is not memory pause/resume - a halted workspace boots again from the preserved disk. For memory-state suspend, see pause.

Park a workspace, then pick it back up later:

Terminal window
microagent halt research
microagent start research

You’ll rarely need flags here - --state-dir only when the workspace lives outside the default ~/.microagent/.

FlagDescription
--name <name>Workspace name; positional name is also accepted
--id <id>Workspace ID alias for --name
--state-dir <dir>State directory holding the workspace record (default ~/.microagent/)
--backend <name>Backend identity override
--supervisor <path>Override the installed host backend supervisor path

See global flags for --json/--text/--output/--mode/--supervisor.

halt exits 0 on success; nonzero when the workspace cannot be found or the clean shutdown fails. In AX mode a failure is written as a structured error envelope.

  • start - boot the halted workspace again
  • stop - signal a misbehaving VM instead
  • kill - force-terminate when nothing returns
  • status - confirm the halted state