Status and sleeping

Status	Meaning
Building	A deploy is in progress.
Running	Up and serving.
Sleeping	Idle, so Toft stopped the process. The next request wakes it.
Stopped	Stopped by a person or a lock. Stays down until started.
Ready	A batch app with a deployment. Runs jobs, serves nothing.
Crashed	Exited, never came up, or kept running out of memory.
Failed	The last deploy didn’t produce a working deployment.

Sleeping

A sleeping app still answers its address; the first request is slower while it starts. If that delay matters, make startup faster.

Apps sleep only if your administrator set an idle timeout; Settings → Runtime → Never sleep shows it. An app never sleeps if it runs in isolated mode or an administrator exempted it. A job’s schedule does not keep it awake: jobs run in their own process.

What visitors see when the app can’t answer

If your app is stopped, sleeping, starting, crashed, locked or still building, Toft answers in its place with a page saying so, with status 503. That page always carries an X-Toft-Interstitial header naming the state — for example stopped, sleeping, waking, crashed or deploy_failed — and your app’s own responses never do. A monitor or script can check for the header to tell Toft’s page from a 503 your app sent itself.

Why an app crashes

The Logs tab has the reason. Usually:

• It didn’t listen on the port in PORT.
• A variable is missing. Your app gets only what is set for it, never your shell’s environment.
• The process exited. A web app must keep running; for run-and-exit work, use a job.
• It ran out of memory.

A start that isn’t up after five minutes reads Crashed, with the backend’s reason.

Restarts are bounded

• Five restarts within fifteen minutes raises a Restart loop event.
• An isolated app is restarted up to five times, then left down with a Not restarting event.
• After three memory kills on one deployment, the app is stopped and marked Crashed. The memory ceiling is under Settings → Runtime; only an administrator can raise it.

Starting and stopping

On the app page, a stopped app’s first button is Start app and a crashed app’s is Restart app. Start, Restart and Stop are also in the ⋯ menu. From the command line:

toft stop
toft start
toft restart --wait

A restart runs the same deployment again. It doesn’t rebuild or re-check dependencies.