Under systemd's Restart=always, --replace turns every restart into a
self-kill loop: the new instance reads gateway.pid, kills the previous
process, writes its own PID, and on the next restart the cycle repeats.
A process supervisor owns the lifecycle — --replace is for manual
one-shot takeovers and fights the supervisor.
Remove --replace from both the system-level and user-level systemd
ExecStart lines. The --replace flag stays available for manual
'hermes gateway run --replace' and on the macOS launchd fallback path
(#23387), which is a deliberate manual takeover, not a supervised unit.
Also drop RestartMaxDelaySec / RestartSteps from the templates — they
require systemd v255+ and are silently ignored on older versions. The
_strip_optional_systemd_directives normalizer stays so existing installs
whose on-disk unit still carries those directives aren't flagged as
outdated.
Credit: reported and diagnosed by @Skippy-the-Magnificent-one (PR #37145);
reimplemented here under project authorship because the original commit
was authored under a non-existent email.
Teknium
4d18717b6c