Manage, update, uninstall

Haypile runs itself: the daemon starts when needed and the index migrates on its own. This page covers the few lifecycle moments where you take the wheel.

The daemon lifecycle

The daemon is a single background process serving the API on 127.0.0.1:11500 and watching your indexed folders. hay add, hay web, and hay mcp-stdio start it automatically when it is not running; its address and pid live in ~/.haypile/daemon.json.

To run it in the foreground instead, with logs in your terminal:

hay serve

To stop a background daemon:

pkill -f "hay serve"

Stopping it costs you nothing permanent. Search and every other command keep working through direct index access; folder watching pauses until the next command starts the daemon again.

Update

However you installed, update the same way:

brew upgrade hay                      # Homebrew
curl -fsSL haypile.sh | sh            # install script (replaces the binary)
irm https://haypile.sh/install.ps1 | iex   # Windows PowerShell

Then restart the daemon so the new binary serves: pkill -f "hay serve" and run any hay command.

Your index needs nothing from you across versions. There are no migrations to run, and when an update improves text extraction, affected files re-index themselves on the next pass; unchanged text hits the embedding cache, so even a full re-index is quick.

Uninstall

Four steps remove every trace. Haypile never modifies your documents, so this is the complete list:

pkill -f "hay serve"          # 1. stop the daemon
brew uninstall hay            # 2. remove the binary (script installs: rm /usr/local/bin/hay)
rm -rf ~/.haypile             # 3. delete the index and runtime files

On Windows the binary lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\hay and the data directory is %USERPROFILE%\.haypile.

4. Folders set up with hay init may contain a .haypile.yml and .mcp.json; delete them if you do not want the config to apply on a future install.

There is no account to close and nothing server-side to request deletion from, because nothing ever left your machine.