Status & Health

The dashboard

After your system is created, merka shows the dashboard. This is the steady-state view of your running system. It shows:

System name and connection URL
System phase (Normal, Preparing)
Service health — How many services are ready vs total
Reachability — Whether the system is responding to health checks

The dashboard automatically reconnects if the connection drops: it polls the system’s health endpoint every 10 seconds and updates the display silently. If the system becomes unreachable, the status indicator changes to “Offline” and switches back to “Connected” when it recovers.

Dashboard tabs and actions

The dashboard sidebar has five tabs, selectable with the number keys:

Key	Tab
1	Home
2	Photos
3	Files
4	AI Chat
5	Settings

The Home tab also offers two actions:

Action	Description
Settings	Open settings
Start over / reset	Remove the local system and start fresh

Using `merka status`

For a quick health check without opening the TUI:

merka status

It prints your system’s address, overall status, phase, service readiness, whether claiming is required, and the remote-access state:

System:        http://192.168.64.2:7474
System Status: Healthy
Phase:         Normal
Services:      12/12 ready
Claiming:      Not required
Remote Access: Enabled (Tailscale)

If services are unhealthy, they’re listed below with a reason:

Services:      10/12 ready

Unhealthy services:
  storage                        Pending (waiting to start)
  photos                         Pending (waiting for database)

JSON output

For scripting or automation:

merka status --json

Returns a merka.status.v1 JSON document with all health details.

Service health

Your Merka system runs several internal services. You don’t need to manage them individually — merka status gives you the aggregate health. But if something goes wrong, the unhealthy service list tells you what’s stuck and why.

Common service states:

State	Meaning
Ready	Running and healthy
Pending	Waiting to start (usually waiting for a dependency)
Deploying	Currently being set up
Failed	Something went wrong (check the reason)

System phases

Phase	What it means
Normal	Everything is running. This is the steady state.
Preparing	Services are still coming online after a fresh start or restart.

Monitoring over time

The TUI dashboard refreshes automatically. When connected to the event stream, updates are real-time. If the stream drops, a periodic health poll keeps the display current until the stream reconnects.

To watch status changes from the command line:

watch -n 5 merka status