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These commands are read-only. They do not deploy workloads or change the Towbar control plane.

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towbar status

Show the Docker Compose process table for the active Towbar release.
The command accepts no parameters. It requires root, Docker Engine, Compose v2, and an installed release. Use it to see container state, health, published ports, and whether a service repeatedly exits.

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towbar logs

Show recent output from every service or a selected list of Compose services.
Syntax
The CLI asks Docker Compose for the most recent 200 lines by default. Set TOWBAR_LOG_TAIL for a different limit. Additional Docker Compose log options, such as --follow, are passed through.
bash sudo towbar logs
The selected installation runs either gateway or gateway-public. One-time services normally exit successfully and may have useful logs even though they do not stay running.

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towbar doctor

Run a complete, read-only health inspection and print a pass, warning, or failure for each check.
The command accepts no parameters. It returns nonzero when any required check fails. Warnings alone do not make it fail.
Checks the Linux distribution, CPU architecture, required executables, Docker Engine, Compose v2, available disk, host memory, and clock synchronization.
Measures downloaded Towbar releases, Towbar-managed application images, and control-plane volumes. It reports apparent usage without deleting anything.
Verifies that the environment file exists, is owned by root:root with mode 600, and passes the same configuration parsing used by the running release.
Checks every long-running service, restart counts, PostgreSQL readiness, and whether running containers match the installed release commit.
Confirms that the local gateway publishes only 127.0.0.1:4021, the dashboard health endpoint responds, and external REST and MCP access remain disabled.
Confirms ports 80 and 443, DNS resolution, dashboard HTTPS, API routing, the certificate lifetime and issuer, persisted Caddy certificate state, GitHub reachability, and Let’s Encrypt reachability.
Use the detail printed under a failed check as the next action. Run towbar logs for the named service, correct the underlying host or configuration problem, validate configuration, then restart only when the preflight passes.

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towbar version

Print the installed Towbar release and the CLI version.
Installed example
If the CLI exists without an installation, the first line is Towbar is not installed. towbar -v and towbar --version are aliases.

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towbar help

Print every top-level command and its short syntax.
towbar -h, towbar --help, and towbar with no command produce the same output. An unknown command exits nonzero and suggests towbar help.
Last modified on September 22, 2026